Angoulême 2025 – Day 1: The children are fine, Laurent Lafitte, Erige Sehiri
Daily assessment of the 18th edition of the French -speaking film festival in Angoulême.
The film of the day: Children are doing well from Nathan Ambrosioni
The Angoumois competition starts a beating drum with the third feature film by Nathan Ambrosioni after Paper flags (2018) and Family tone (2023). Both at only 26 years old, he continues to amaze by the maturity of his writing and his talent to sign portraits of women of such acuity. Her film opens with a a priori banal visit that Suzanne gives her sister Jeanne. Except that the next day, Suzanne disappeared without leaving an address but a simple word to tell Jeanne that she entrusted her two young children to her. Where did his sister left? Why did she decided to evaporate without giving an explanation? And above all, how can we manage these two children overnight when she was never a mother and spontaneously feel no maternal instinct?
Here are all the questions that instantly jostle in Jeanne’s head, both Ko Standing and in the obligation to act as quickly as possible, based on her ex Nicole, whose unrequited maternity desire had participated in the rupture. Transcending the subject of voluntary disappearances, Ambrosioni signs a great film on the family, the links that unites its members and can at any time stretch or even break. A film of infinite sensitivity without cries or clashes where pain, anxieties are first internalized and silent, so as not to panic the two young children. We come out also turned upside down as epated by the quality of this scenario and the way in which her performers take it: Juliette Armanet (Suzanne) Monia Chokri (Nicole) but also and above all Camille Cottin (Jeanne) to whom Ambrosioni still offers a major role after Family toneconfirming that she flourishes like never before in her game under her direction.
Release on December 3
The actor of the day: Laurent Lafitte in The richest woman in the world
A few months after its presentation in Cannes, The richest woman in the world opened the 18th edition of the Angoulême Festival in style last night. Thierry Klifa seized it with malice and finesse of the famous Bettencourt affair and the particular link which united Liliane Bettencourt to photographer François-Marie Banier. By changing the names of the protagonists, the filmmaker never stammers with the many articles and documentaries devoted to the subject. And takes the side of comedy as a prism of this tearing family story-by painful buried secrets and the unsaid that will free themselves-as Hilarain-by cynicism, the cruelty and the sharp sense of distribution that elephant deployed in a porcelain store, the character inspired by François-Marie Banier.
But to camp this man who fascinates as much as he insupports and his extreme mood and humor variations, he needed an actor capable of playing excess – in words, gaze and body – without precisely adding. In permanent connection with its partners (and what partners! Isabelle Huppert, Marina Foïs, Mathieu Demy, André Marcon, Raphaël Personnaz…) to never give in to the ease of one man show. Laurent Lafitte is of that caliber. And the royal road towards an appointment to the César – which would be a first in the category best actor – is wide open to him.
Release on October 29
The director of the day: Erige Sehiri for Promised the sky
We discovered the Franco-Tunisian director Erige Sehiri in 2022 with Under the figshis very first fictional feature, door in the open air which told the daily life and the desire for emancipation of agricultural workers in the orchards in the northwest of Tunisia. And we find in Promised the sky Everything that made it salt. Starting with the way in which his eye as a documentary maker feeds fiction. And even inspire it. Since it is by making in 2016 a documentary on students from sub -Saharan Africa who came to study in Tunisia that the idea of this Promised the skybuilt around an Ivorian pastor and former journalist living in Tunis and hosting under her roof a young mother in search of a better future and a determined student who carries the hopes of her family who have remained in the country. Promised the sky Talk about the difficulty in finding its place in a country that is not its, despite a racism that knows neither border nor latitude. All without breaking open doors thanks to a writing of female characters rich in nuances and paradoxes.
Release on November 26
