La Gradiva Panorama © Films du poisson, Bibi Film TV, Arte France Cinema

Winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes’ Critics’ Week, La Gradiva is an incisive, intricately composed feature debut that follows a class of French high school students on a trip to Naples, Italy. While learning about the ruins of Pompeii by day, a different kind of education takes place at the dorms, on the bus, and at group dinners, where heightened emotions, hormones, and matters of class and social hierarchy add some notable life lessons to the curriculum. But with some being more sensitive than others, the trip takes a devastating turn as one of the student’s inner turmoil takes root.

Marine Atlan stuns with her mastery of cinematic vocabulary, sculpting a remarkably perceptive, elegant, and formally complex film, with no shot or moment wasted in its study of adolescence. Atlan draws from this microcosm of supercharged circumstances with great precision, mining key moments of individual and group interactions — from students, teachers, even drivers and service staff — delivering in the process a modern classic.

AMI Paris Grand Prize: Critics’ Week, Cannes 2026