Marine Atlan's debut feature, "La Gradiva," makes its North American premiere at the 2026 Toronto Film Festival on Monday, continuing a run of momentum that began with its Grand Prize win in the Critics' Week sidebar at this year's Cannes Film Festival. The film is a finalist in the competition to become France's official Oscar submission and is set for a December U.S. release through 1-2 Special, which acquired the title out of Cannes. It currently holds a 100 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Hollywood Reporter's review called it a "stunning feature debut."
"La Gradiva" follows a French class on a school trip to Pompeii, with an ensemble made up almost entirely of newcomers. The main storylines belong to Toni (Colas Quignard), who explores his family's ties to Pompeii while pursuing romantic encounters with various men in town; his best friend James (Mitia Capellier-Audat), who appears to have everything going for him; and Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a loner increasingly worn down by her classmates. Antonia Buresi appears as Madame Mercier. Atlan, a cinematographer by trade, split director of photography duties on the film with longtime collaborator Pierre Mazoyer.
Atlan said the project grew out of her admiration for a series of 1990s French films, "Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge," which featured directors including André Téchiné and Chantal Akerman, and from her long-standing interest in Wilhelm Jensen's text "Gradiva," filtered through Freud's reading of Pompeii as a metaphor for the unconscious. She wrote the screenplay with co-writer Anne Brouillet and spent two years on casting, using street-casting methods that included visits to high schools as students were leaving for the day, political demonstrations, and non-professional acting classes to assemble the three leads and the wider ensemble around them.
Once the leads were cast, Atlan and Brouillet adjusted the script based on months of rehearsals and recorded improvisations, including conversations with Quignard about what he was and wasn't comfortable performing in the film's intimate scenes. Atlan said Capellier-Audat brought an unexpected "androgyny and fluidity" to the role of James that reshaped the character's relationship to masculinity. Before shooting, the team interviewed young people about gender, sexuality, feminism and environmentalism, and accompanied an actual school trip to research the anxieties tied to France's academic selection systems.
Shot largely in Naples, the film's visual approach evolved from a documentary-style realism into what Atlan described as something "more lyrical," citing Douglas Sirk as a reference point as the story moves toward melodrama, including longer, uncut sequence shots in its later sections. The production wrapped only days before its Cannes premiere. Since then, Atlan has moved directly into cinematography work on another director's debut feature while helping organize "La Gradiva"'s international release. "I don't entirely realize what's happening yet," she said, adding that working on someone else's film has helped her "keep a cool head."
