The raw heartache of high school’s final days, in all their promise and messiness, becomes the ground for an immersive, ethnographically precise exploration of teenage feelings in “La Gradiva.”
Written, helmed, and shot by Marine Atlan, the French-language coming-of-age story is set in and around Naples and Pompeii on a class trip that proves profoundly life-shifting for all — and with a terrific cast of first-time actors she found literally on the street, all encouraged to bring their own perspectives to the material. Atlan’s first as a director, the film won Cannes Critics’ Week, where the smarthouse indie outfit 1-2 Special bought it for a winter stateside release.
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Launched in 2025, 1-2 Special also held court at the New York Film Festival (NYFF) with Cannes-winning German Oscar entry “Everytime” and bought Venice Prize winner and NYFF breakout “A Day in the Life of Jo: Chapter Phaedra” earlier this week. The films form a trio of emotional studies of adolescence shaped by grief. While “Everytime” heads for a qualifying run in November ahead of wider release, “La Gradiva” is first up for theaters, launching on December 18. For cinephiles, these were among NYFF’s buzziest discoveries.
France ultimately chose the Russian-language (and partly French-produced) “Minotaur” to represent in the Best International Feature Oscar category, but “La Gradiva” is riding high as one of the year’s most acclaimed films. Especially after outstanding play in Toronto and New York. Atlan, in her mid-30s, has long worked as a cinematographer, building toward the directorial debut she shot herself — announcing a multihyphenate talent who will surely graduate to the next level at Cannes with her next film. Critics’ Week has historically helped propel now-renowned filmmakers like Bernardo Bertolucci, Andrea Arnold, Leos Carax, Julia Ducournau, Alejandro González Iñárritu, David Robert Mitchell, Justine Triet, François Ozon, and Gaspar Noé to competition and onto the international scene. Atlan’s arrival heralds a discovery on their level.
A loose-limbed vérité drama whose dialogue and scenarios grew from Atlan’s screenplay, co-written with Anne Brouillet, and the actors’ improvisation during rehearsal, “La Gradiva” opens both a window onto teen desire and yearning, and something much grander and sprawling. It follows a troupe of French teenagers as they travel to Naples, guided by their overworked teacher, Mercier (Antonia Buresi), who wants to show her students another slice of the world before they enter adulthood.
There’s the drifting, haunted, intense-eyed Toni (Colas Quignard), who seizes the trip to explore his sexuality — especially with one delicately directed Grindr hookup — even as he harbors a crush on his best friend, the charismatic James (Mitia Capellier-Audat). We first meet James, the most politically activated of the bunch, having sex (perhaps for the first time?) with a female classmate on the train as Toni watches, glowering. This voyeuristic moment sets the stage for painful revelations to follow, as “La Gradiva” gradually mines the fissures of a friendship.
Meanwhile, the bookish, introverted, aspiring artist Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin) has, in her own words, deemed herself “unfuckable,” but she will have a sensual awakening — and more — of her own. They immerse themselves in art history and archeology, and in Toni’s own fraught family history tied to the place, as they discover the ruins of Pompeii and bodies desiccated under ash many, many centuries ago. All the actors are what you’d call “nonprofessional.” But nothing about their deeply internalized performances feels nonprofessional, as they suffuse “La Gradiva” with a docudrama atmosphere.
“I wasn’t against the idea of using actresses and actors who were professionals, even for the young people in the film, but it was very important to me that the actors and actresses be the same age as the characters,” Atlan told IndieWire, via translator Nicholas Elliott, during a recent IndieWire interview, speaking on the film’s two-year-long audition process.
“It’s relatively rare to find professionals of that young age. We did see some people who had acted before, did some casting sessions. What was really important for me was to have this sensation of realism, of something familiar, so that when people saw this film, they would be able to reconfigure faces that perhaps they knew from their own classes at school,” she said. “Having unknown faces would help produce that effect. So what happened is that my casting director, Julie Sokolowski, and I did what indeed we call street casting.”
That meant standing outside schools as kids left for the day, observing amateur theater groups, and attending political demonstrations in Paris. That’s how, for one, they discovered Mitia Capellier-Audat, who’d been participating in the city’s annual May 1 anarchist demonstration.
“We spent at least six months in the audition process with him because, in his case, it was really shifting the character quite significantly, really going towards something rather gender fluid,” Atlan said. “I did want some androgyny in the case of that character, but Mitia really has a femininity. So for that character, it was really quite a significant change.”
The actor is also “very politicized in his life,” so Atlan’s production had to respond, including in a pivotal scene where the students debate their own generation’s political positions. Some of the film’s situations emerged out of rehearsal improv. “When I saw Mitia make his arguments, when I saw him give his opinions, when I saw that he had a dialectic relationship to politics, I thought that this would be a very interesting thing to have the character have in that scene.”
Elsewhere, “in terms of Colas, he had been a dancer for 10 years,” Atlan said. “So when I was directing him as an actor, I really worked on his relationship to the body. Suzanne’s kind of rebellious temperament brought a lucidity to that character. So I would say that the actors’ personalities reinforced and deepened the interpretation or embodiment of the characters.”
The film took three years from start to finish. Building scenarios out of rehearsal “allowed us to constantly readapt or readjust the writing,” said Atlan, who also worked as a director of photography on other projects during pre-production.
“La Gradiva” proved demanding for the first-time actors because of the onscreen sensuality, and Atlan and her team had to adjust the level of intimacy required with their collaboration.
“I wanted this film to be about desire, to have that be an important theme of the film, but it was even more important to find the right actors and actresses to play the characters. So once we had our three leads, we had an intimacy coordinator, and we set up a situation where we worked with them to get them to the point where they were comfortable touching each other and so on,” she said. “They also gave me an official document listing what they were willing to do and what they weren’t willing to do. So to be very concrete, Colas did not want to kiss anyone. That, in some cases, meant that I had to rewrite things.”
But that reconfiguration also influenced how Atlan would film scenes. “When Toni meets an Italian man on Grindr, so much takes place off-scene, offscreen… I always had in mind that these are 17-year-olds, and it was unthinkable to try to make them do something they didn’t want to do.”
She was, after all, not making a Larry Clark movie (“we can’t do that,” Atlan laughed). But to that point, “La Gradiva” feels like the most immersive teen drama since the 1995 drug-and-sex-filled, New York-set “Kids” (a far cry from “La Gradiva” in that sense) reinvented the genre for independent film and delivered an ensemble of major new young actors.
As for what Atlan is up to next, “I just finished shooting a first feature by a woman director this summer as a director of photography. And now, little by little, I’m going to try to start writing my next feature film as I’m accompanying the release of [‘La Gradiva’]. I’m always going to try to keep that balance.”
“La Gradiva” opens from 1-2 Special stateside starting December 18.