The 64th Cannes Critics’ Week will open with Adam’s Interest by Belgian director Laura Wandel and close with Dandelion’s Odyssey, the animated feature debut by Japanese filmmaker Momoko Seto. This year’s edition, which runs May 14–22, includes seven feature films in competition and four presented out of competition.
Wandel’s new film follows a young mother, a malnourished child, and a hospital nurse, played by Anamaria Vartolomei and Léa Drucker. Shot with handheld camerawork, Adam’s Interest marks Wandel’s return after Playground, her 2021 feature that portrayed schoolyard bullying with stark realism. The film will screen as a special presentation.
Among the films selected for competition is Left-Handed Girl, the first solo feature by Taiwanese director Shih-Ching Tsou. Set in Taipei, the film centers on a single mother and her two daughters attempting to rebuild their lives. Sean Baker, known for The Florida Project and Tangerine, co-wrote, produced, and edited the film. Tsou and Baker previously collaborated on several projects, and this film continues their grounded, observational style. According to Critics’ Week artistic director Ava Cahen, the film is marked by fast pacing and strong visual structure.
Spanish filmmaker Guillermo Galoe will present Sleepless City, filmed in the informal settlement of La Cañada Real outside Madrid. The film focuses on two close friends facing separation when one of them prepares to move away. Local residents participated in the production.
Belgian director Alexe Poukine’s Kika stars Manon Clavel as a social worker who learns she is pregnant shortly after her partner’s death. Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke offers a different perspective on family through A Useful Ghost, in which a mother returns to her household in the form of a vacuum cleaner. Mai Davika Hoorne leads the cast.
French filmmaker Pauline Loquès contributes Nino, featuring Quebecois actor Théodore Pellerin as a young man who loses the keys to his apartment and wanders the streets of Paris over three days.
Chechen director Deni Oumar Pitsaev’s Imago, a documentary selected from 200 submissions, follows his effort to construct an experimental home in a remote Georgian valley, positioned at the border of Chechnya. The project examines personal aspirations in tension with geographical and cultural setting.
Dutch filmmaker Sven Bresser’s Reedland marks the first Dutch-language feature by a Dutch director to screen in Critics’ Week in over a decade. It follows a reed cutter who becomes emotionally unsettled after discovering the body of a teenage girl. The incident sets off a chain of reactions shaped by his own internal conflicts.
Two other out-of-competition screenings join Adam’s Interest. French director Martin Jauvat’s Baise en Ville follows an unemployed man wandering his neighborhood while searching for funds to pay for driving lessons. Jauvat also stars in the film alongside William Lebghil and Emmanuelle Bercot.
Love Letters, a first feature from Alice Douard, is a comedic drama involving two women on the verge of becoming parents—one through pregnancy, the other through adoption. Their preparations are thrown off-course by a series of unpredictable events. Ella Rumpf and Monia Chokri play the lead roles.
The closing film, Dandelion’s Odyssey, follows four dandelions seeking a place to root after surviving a nuclear event. It is the first animated feature in Critics’ Week since I Lost My Body in 2019.
This year’s jury is chaired by Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen and includes British actor Daniel Kaluuya, Moroccan critic Jihane Bougrine, French-Canadian cinematographer Josée Deshaies, and Indonesian producer Yulia Evina Bhara. The panel will award prizes including the AMI Paris Grand Prix, the Leitz Cine Discovery Prize for short films, the French Touch Jury Prize, and the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award.
