In a year of strong starts, none is more astonishing than La Gradiva, the directorial debut of cinematographer Marine Atlan (Jessica Forever, The Girl in the Snow). Premiering at Cannes Critics’ Week, where it won the Grand Prize, the odyssey follows a group of French high schoolers who take a trip to Pompeii as desires and struggles start to bubble. Picked up by 1-2 Special, the film is coming to the New York Film Festival ahead of a December 18 release, and we’re pleased to exclusively debut its gorgeous first poster.
Here’s the New York Film Festival synopsis: “A high school trip to Naples for a group of French teenagers becomes a multifaceted, revelatory experience in Marine Atlan’s exceptionally accomplished feature debut, which won the Grand Prize at the 2026 Cannes Critics’ Week. Also working as her own cinematographer, Atlan captures the interactions and intimacies of her compelling cast of characters with pinpoint emotional precision, their desires and frustrations pinballing off each other with escalating tension as they visit frescoes, museums, and volcanic sites near Pompeii. Atlan’s vividly drawn characters—troubled, working-class Toni (Colas Quignard), who firmly believes he’s related to an aristocratic Neapolitan family due to family lore; preternaturally self-composed lothario James (Mitia Capellier-Audat); melancholy yet coolheaded Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), who feels invisible; their animated yet wearied Latin teacher, Mme. Mercier (Antonia Buresi)—are further enriched when placed within the historical continuum of love and death that defines the history of the region, granting them an almost mythic grandeur. A 1-2 Special release.”
Martin Tsai said in our Critic’s Pick review from Cannes, “Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva begins from a familiar cinematic premise: a school trip abroad for a busload of restless teenagers temporarily freed from the surveillance of home. Yet the film steadily slips from the gravitational pull of genre. The phrase ‘teen movie’ tends to conjure the noisy architecture of comedy or horror—locker-room farce, hormonal panic, slasher-movie bloodshed—and, more recently, the issue-oriented earnestness of coming-out narratives or school-shooting dramas. Atlan’s remarkable debut instead concerns itself with something more elusive and difficult to dramatize: the murky psychological territory between childhood and adulthood, where identity is still provisional and intimacy shifts shape by the hour. Her characters resemble recognizable archetypes—the brooding outsider, the sexually adventurous couple, the shy observer—but never calcify into caricature. The dynamics remain unstable, constantly rearranging themselves with the volatility of adolescence itself.”
See the exclusive poster premiere below.
