Gabin Insights
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About
When Maxence Voiseux first films Gabin Jourdel, he is eight years old — the youngest child in a farming family in rural northern France. Over the next decade, we witness Gabin’s growth and the animals, schoolwork, chores, and imagined futures that define his youth. His father wants him to inherit the butcher shop, but Gabin is more concerned with living animals — and in helping save his mother’s cattle farm from financial ruin.
Voiseux’s feature documentary debut has the patience to let its conflict unfold without wringing it for drama. Her access is extraordinary precisely for its ordinariness: time moves without declaring itself, and the camera joins its subjects for family arguments, quiet work, and the small changes that mark the passage of adolescence. Premiering in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Gabin turns coming of age into a question of inheritance, following a child’s tenderness toward animals as it becomes a young man’s fight for a life of his own choosing.
Media Partner
Voiseux’s feature documentary debut has the patience to let its conflict unfold without wringing it for drama. Her access is extraordinary precisely for its ordinariness: time moves without declaring itself, and the camera joins its subjects for family arguments, quiet work, and the small changes that mark the passage of adolescence. Premiering in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Gabin turns coming of age into a question of inheritance, following a child’s tenderness toward animals as it becomes a young man’s fight for a life of his own choosing.
Media Partner
