La Gradiva Tops the Critics’ Week Awards

Atlan, a cinematographer who was nominated for a César for her work on Louise Hémon’s The Girl in the Snow (2025), has cowritten her first feature as a director with Anne Brouillet. The title is a reference to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novel Gradiva, the story of an archeologist who becomes obsessed with a woman depicted in a bas-relief he comes across in a Roman museum. In a dream, the anthropologist sees his Gradiva walking the streets of Pompeii as the eruption of Vesuvius subsumes the city in 79 AD. Freud was so taken by the novel that he psychoanalyzed the archeologist in his 1907 essay “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva.”

In Atlan’s film, French Latin teacher Madame Mercier—“played with superb intelligence and sympathy by Antonia Buresi,” notes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw—takes her class of high-school students on a field trip to Pompeii and Naples. As Amber Wilkinson writes in Screen, “three teenagers immediately catch the camera’s interest on the train south. Chief among them is Toni (Colas Quignard), a disruptive joker who commands attention from both students and frustrated teachers. His best mate, James (Mitia Capellier), is a lothario, even managing a quick close encounter on the train—a scene that sharply contrasts intimacy with Toni observing from outside the carriage. Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), meanwhile, is an arty loner, introduced as she watches Toni watching James. Whether you are an observer or a participant is a crucial element of teen life, and Atlan takes her time tracing this through everyday interactions, from dancing to drinking dares.”

Aina Clotet has been acting since she was eleven, and in 2024, she won an award for Best Performance at Canneseries for This Is Not Sweden, which she created and directed. Now the first feature she’s written, directed, and starred in, Viva, has won the Rising Star Award. Clotet plays Nora, who has not only just turned forty but also beaten cancer. Viva is “a portrait of a woman ablaze, racing to seize every second of life in the face of the threat of losing it,” writes Alfonso Rivera at Cineuropa. Whether Clotet “succeeds in creating a role compelling enough to balance out the overfamiliarity of well-worn formulas will very much depend on individual affinities,” suggests Jay Weissberg in Variety.

Two collateral prizes were also presented on Wednesday. The Gan Foundation Award for Distribution, presented to support a theatrical release in France, went to Zou Jing’s A Girl Unknown, the story of a girl in China moving from one family to another—and then to a third—between the ages of six and eighteen. Each family gives her a new name. “In a commendably restrained manner,” writes John Berra for Screen, “Zou closely examines how such cycles of displacement cause existential anxieties to fester to the point of identity dissolution.”

The SACD Award, presented to the best screenplay by France’s Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers, went to Blerta Basholli and Nicole Borgeat for Dua, the second feature directed by Basholli, who won a Grand Jury Prize, a Directing Award, and an Audience Award at Sundance for Hive (2021). Pinea Matoshi stars as thirteen-year-old Dua, an ethnic Albanian in Kosovo in the late 1990s, when Serbians led by Slobodan Milošević were beginning a clampdown that would eventually lead to war.

“Unlike the majority of war movies, Dua avoids hysteria by focusing on the relatively small instances that can tip a person over the edge,” writes David Jenkins at Little White Lies. Dua takes up judo, and just when “it feels as if things are about to get all Karate Kid on us,” writes Jenkins, “the film shifts away from all that and doubles down on the fact that this is not a fair fight, and that it’s going to take more than some finely-honed grappling skills to send the Serbians packing.”