Nouvelles Vagues – day 3: La Gradiva, Big girls don’t cry and Laïla Marrakchi
Every day, a look back at the highlights of the 2026 edition of the Biarritz festival dedicated to stories highlighting youth
Film of the day: La Gradiva by Marine Atlan
One of the best films from Cannes entered the Biarritz competition yesterday. And a second viewing only reinforces our first impression. Marine Atlan, highly talented cinematographer (The Rapture, The Queens of Drama…) here is her first feature film as a director. A film like an emergence. That of a group of young actors with no on-screen experience (accompanied by the brilliant Antonio Buresi) and astonishingly accurate, truthful and intense in the central roles: a group of high school students going on a school trip to Pompei. And this new breath takes this teen movie far, very far, high, very high, which shifts into a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama. La Gradiva is a 2.5 hour fresco which masterfully brings together the sacred and the profane. One of the most beautiful cinematographic gestures of this first part of the 2026 cinema year.
In theaters November 4
The revelation of the day: Ani Palmer in Big girls don’t cry
Located in 2006, Big girls don’t cry depicts the summer of young Sid’s 14th birthday. The summer of all first times. First romantic emotions. First real exchanges via MSN where she pretends to be her best friend’s brother in order to get in touch with the girls she dreams of being. First big betrayals of friendship. First sexual intercourse more or less consensual so as not to appear the stuck one of the group. Nouvelles Vagues festival-goers gave this film a standing ovation, which deserves it so much. New Zealand director Paloma Schneidman chronicles the MSN generation with documentary precision that leaves no detail to chance. She films skin, faces and bodies at the height of adolescence. There is something of Jane Campion (also executive producer of the film) in this filmmaker who reveals in front of her camera an incredible debutante: Ani Palmer. A presence. An ability to say so much with a simple look, a sudden blush of skin. And to tell through the clumsy movements of his body and his face the troubles, the fears, the joys, the shame, the outbursts which cross his character in turn or even at the same time. A marvelous coming of age story that, one way or another, should make the charts.
Undetermined exit
The winning comeback of the day: Laïla Marrakchi for Strawberries
We loved his first feature film, Moroccodiscovered in Cannes in 2005. A little less his second, Rock The Casbah2013. And since then, Laïla Marrakchi has focused on series, directing several episodes of Legends Officeof The Eddy or even Lent. Strawberries marks his big return to the big screen. A winning comeback which finds its origins in an article that one of her best friends, a journalist for The New York Times, devoted to the dehumanized daily life of Moroccan seasonal workers in strawberry greenhouses in Spain and in the desire to take on this subject through the prism of fiction. Six years of writing with Delphine Agut (César for best screenplay 2025 for The Story of Souleymane) will be necessary to find the right tone and imagine a story that goes beyond the simple representation of reality. Laïla Marrakchi decided – successfully – to bring the story to life from the point of view of the oppressed. In this case, two Moroccan women who will dare to rebel against this system of exploitation at the risk of losing everything. And this without falling into the trap of making them perfect characters, the economic distress in which they find themselves also forcing them from time to time to act in contradiction with their convictions. This is precisely what gives depth and even more power to a story that transcends the expected social drama into a true survival movie, with sorority as the only weapons to defend and counterattack. Through her staging, Laïla Marrakchi transforms these greenhouses as far as the eye can see into a real prison that is increasingly suffocating for those who work there, subject to the goodwill and perversity of the little bosses who command them. A winning return.
Undetermined exit
