Critics’ Week Artistic Director Ava Cahen unveiled her fourth selection as head of the Cannes Film Festival parallel selection on Monday, ahead of the fest’s 64th edition running May 14-22.
The section run by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics will showcase 11 first and second features, seven of which play in competition, selected from 1,000 submissions. Another 13 short films will also be showcased, selected from 2,340 entries.
Deadline caught up with Cahen for some first impressions on the 2025 lineup.
DEADLINE: The section opens with Laura Wandel’s second feature Adam’s Interest, starring Ana Vartolomei as a mother whose son is admitted to hospital with signs of malnutrition. Why did you select this film for your opening?
AVA CAHEN: Laura shook spectators with her first film [Playground]. There, we were at the level of a child. Here we are at the level of an adult. It has the same directorial mechanics, with its documentary-style of approaching reality and its characters, and close-up camera work. It takes place in a pediatric unit where a mother and her malnourished son are followed by a nurse who does all she can to prevent the mother and child being separated.
Without saying too much, the story taps into the Munchausen syndrome. We found it very, very powerful because a bit like Saint-Omer, even though they are very different films, Laura’s film also speaks in a new way about maternal bonds and motherhood. There’s a desire to break with the clichéd images of the good mother, the courageous mother, to present mothers who are a bit more ambiguous and complex.
It’s a film that truly astounded us. It’s barely an hour and a quarter long, it’s a slap in the face. I want to open with very powerful cinematic gestures, films that, through cinema, transcend their subjects each time. Films like Àma Gloria [which opened the section in 2023], which had a very beautiful, pure, emotional touch, or Ghost Trial last year, a fantastic spy film that talked about prisoners under Bashar al-Assad.
DEADLINE: The theme of motherhood is tackled in a number of films this year…
CAHEN: It’s true motherhood is one of this year’s major themes, even if we don’t select films for their subject matter … in films such as Love Letters, A Useful Ghost and Left-Handed Girl. Recurrent themes running through the selection are motherhood, love and precariousness, and often precariousness linked to motherhood, such as in Adam’s Interest and the other Belgian film Kika.
DEADLINE: Six of the 11 features in the lineup are directed by women. Was that a deliberate move?
CAHEN: Among the 1,000 film submissions, a third were directed by women. Without any deliberate policy, or quota on our side, our hearts and our choices led us naturally towards a very powerful and strong cinema carried by women.
DEADLINE: Going back to the theme of precariousness, it’s not only tackled through the prism of motherhood. There are also films like Martin Jauvat’s Baise en Ville and Guillermo Galoe’s Sleepless City.
CAHEN: Yes, there’s a social dimension throughout this year’s lineup … by talking about motherhood and precariousness we’re also talking about rebirth. These films tackling serious social topics do so through a prism of light and hope. These films are delicate, but try to move toward the light and not toward darkness.
It’s the message of the selection. The world is obviously in trouble, and we’re not going to put blinders on … but these films are also about the struggle of young women and men who fight against it and find solutions.
French comedy Baise en Ville, about a young unemployed man who lives in a small town in the Île-de-France region, is an example of that. The protagonist travels on foot or by public transport as he tries to find work, in a society where it’s increasingly difficult to find well-paid work, and where we increasingly have the impression that young people are being asked to do temporary jobs. There’s much less security. The film talks a lot about altruism, about how we connect with each other, and how we can build society together.
DEADLINE: The lineup feels predominantly European and Asian this year…
CAHEN: Asia is in full force. That’s been the case for a while. We had a Taiwanese film last year [Locust] and we have another one this year [Left-Handed Girl], but it’s been years since we welcomed a Thai film, and we have one this year [A Useful Ghost]. Ever since Tiger Stripes [Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu’s film that was selected in 2023] and even before we’ve felt something is happening there, with very strong emerging voices that we want to support
Then there’s Europe, but with European countries that have been less seen recently at Critics’ Week, such as Spain, with Guillermo Galoe’s Sleepless City. The last Spanish film we selected was Libertad by Clara Roquet in 2021, when I wasn’t the artistic director.
DEADLINE: The Netherlands is also represented in the selection for the first time since 1998, with Sven Bresser’s Reedland.
CAHEN: It’s about a grandfather whose life is derailed following the discovery of the lifeless body of a teenage girl. He begins to investigate or counter-investigate and take the police to task. Sven Bresser is very talented. What we also really liked about this film is that it has the feel of a detective tale, but it gradually transforms into a very disturbing thriller, with an almost fantastical atmosphere. You don’t know if what you’re watching is reality, or if it is the man’s fantasies.
DEADLINE: Many of the selected films involve minority or majority French co-producers. What’s behind this trend?
CAHEN: Not everyone can rely on a body like France’s CNC. I think for example about Latin America, which for a number of years was out in force at Critics’ Week. There were Colombian, Brazilian and Argentinian films until last year. But with all that is happening in Latin America, with the dictators, the difficulties facing artists as they try to create, we can feel that there are obstacles, and that less films are being submitted, and then of course, artists in countries at war are also suffering.
French cinema, its producers, can offer support, which is what we see with the autobiographical Chechen documentary [Imago]. I’d love to say there is a strong film industry in Chechnya but it’s not the case. The director is a refugee in France. His documentary addresses questions and themes that resonate with what Europe is going through today, with Ukraine and Russia, since it echoes the wars experienced by Chechnya, Georgia and Russia in the ’90s, and the trauma that this still causes today. We found it atypical and singular. It’s edited by Laurent Sénéchal, who was the editor on Anatomy of a Fall, and also edited last year’s opening film Ghost Trial.
DEADLINE: Imago is also the section’s second documentary selection in two years and follows The Brink of Dreams, which won the Cannes Golden Eye, after premiering in Critics’ Week last year. Are you making a special effort to include documentary?
CAHEN: There’s no quota. The only quota that exists is that a film is a first or second film. The fact we’ve had two documentaries over the past two years is a happy coincidence. It shows the strength of documentaries, and I’d say that’s the case everywhere. We’ve seen documentaries from all over the world. It’s not about filling in blanks. Every time we make a selection, we ask ourselves what do we want to defend here.
DEADLINE: The 2025 edition will close with Momoko Seto’s Dandelion’s Odyssey. Can you tell us a bit about the film?
CAHEN: It’s the first animated feature to play in the section since Jérémy Clapin’s I Lost My Body in 2019, which won the grand prize at Critics’ Week. It’s an ecological fable reminiscent of Flow in the sense that it’s an adventure film without dialogue. But rather than being told from an animal’s point of view, it’s told from that of plants, four dandelions spores which survive a nuclear explosion.
It’s a psychedelic, experimental animated film which is very different in terms of its aesthetics and approach from Flow, but they have this very strong commonality in that they talk about the place of life, ecology, our fears, eco-anxiety, and everything that can happen in terms of natural or human disasters. The film opens with a nuclear explosion that’s phenomenal, very impressive … if someone had told me, “You’re going to cry watching four little dandelion spores live out their adventures,” I wouldn’t have believed it.
DEADLINE: 2024 Cannes Palme d’Or winner Sean Baker is involved in competition title Left-Handed Girl by longtime Taiwanese-American collaborator Shih-Ching Tsou. Is it in a similar vein to his work?
CAHEN: The film was edited by Sean. It’s true that there’s a connection, I’m not going to hide it, and I don’t think Shih-Ching Tsou will either. It’s a bit reminiscent of Tangerine and The Florida Project, for the way it captures reality, with a form of wonder, or at least a desire for the fabulous. The editing of the film is exceptional, the direction is very powerful, and above all, this film has a frenetic pace, a crazy pace.
DEADLINE: Will Sean Baker accompany Shih-Ching Tsou and the film to Cannes?
CAHEN: I don’t know and what interests me most is obviously the director. But in any case, I think it’s great because I can see that Sean Baker’s independent cinema has had offspring. Shih-Ching Tsou follows in the wake of Sean Baker, but she’s not filming the U.S. It’s set in Taipei and that’s what makes it so strong. There is a mix of American and Asian cinema. There’s a fusion that works. It’s a cocktail that I’ve never seen before … We’re madly in love with all 11 films and I feel very spoiled because I think we managed to make a selection which is fundamentally the one we wanted to make. .