Cannes 2025 – Day 7: The Alpha event, Laurent Lafitte Super Assard, the interview with Wagner Moura

Every day, the hot point live from the 78th Cannes Film Festival.

The film of the day: Alpha by Julia Ducournau

Film of the day? Event of the day? Debate of the day? It was in any case one of the biggest expectations of this 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival. And Alpha by Julia Ducournau divides with festival -goers and criticism since his projection in official competition. After his palm of gold for Titanium In 2021, the French filmmaker returned with an incandescent film (which made the cover of the last issue of First).

In this intense story, we follow Alpha, a 13 -year -old troubled teenager who lives alone with her mother. Their world collapses the day she returns from a party with a tattoo on her arm. This apparently harmless gesture triggers a shock wave in their home, against a background of a fictitious epidemic which clearly evokes AIDS from the 80s and 90s.

More intimate than his previous films but no less visceral, Alpha asserts itself as a deeply personal work exploring the traumatic heritage and the transmission of pain between generations. Ducournau’s virtuoso staging offers hallucinated visions (you are not about to forget the men of Peter) who haunt the film’s feverish imagination.

Carried by an impressive cast (notably Tahar Rahim unrecognizable after a radical physical transformation, and the Revelation Mélissa Boros), this incandescent work confirms Ducournau as one of the most singular and daring voices of contemporary cinema. Essential ?

The interview of the day: Wagner Moura for The secret agent

The Brazilian actor, world famous thanks to Narcos and recently seen in Civil Warreturns to the native country with The secret agentfrom Kleber Mendonça Filho, a spellbinding thriller in Brazil in 1977, against a background of political repression, cinephile fantasies and historical memory in Charpie. He tells us how the film was partly born from his friendship with the filmmaker ofAquarius and Bacurauand their fight against Bolsonaro.

“” “Do you know where I met Kleber? Here in Cannes, 20 years ago! In 2005, I presented a film, Bahia, lower townwith a certain look. Kleber was still a film critic at the time, he interviewed me and we immediately got along. My wife even took a photo of him that day! We both come from the same region of Brazil, Nordeste, it creates links. Then time passed, I saw his first short films, and then Recife’s noises (first fictional long of Mendonça Filho, in 2012), which is in my eyes one of the greatest Brazilian films of all time. This is where I started to want to work with him.

But what really brought us closer to us is not cinema is politics. Under Bolsonaro, journalists, teachers, scientists, artists, intellectuals, were the subject of numerous attacks. We were very critical of the regime, and we paid the price. I made a film, Husband (on Carlos Marighella, communist opponent of the military dictatorship, murdered in 1969), which was presented at the Berlin Festival in 2019, but which we could not show in Brazil in 2021. Because these bastards censored it! Kleber also suffered a lot during this period. Our relationship is therefore largely based on the support that we have given ourselves to each other. Basically, it looks a bit like that which is tied between the refugees of The secret agentwhich come together to resist and help each other. The genesis of the film is to be sought there: in a friendship linked by a spirit of resistance.»

The star of the day: Fares Fares in The Eagles of the Republic

The star’s principle is to always place herself above the character she is supposed to embody. The role accommodates an aura. The Libano-Swedish actor Fares Fares Fares went up for his new collaboration with the Swedish filmmaker of Egyptian origin Tarek Saleh (Confidential Cairo,, Cairo conspiracy…) With sunglasses that Elvis would not have denied and an ad hoc flashy jacket. Star therefore. The 52 -year -old actor revealed by the saga Department V Investigationsspent at Bigelow and Star Wars.

In The Eagles of the Republiche embodies a certain George Fahmy nicknamed “the pharaoh of Egyptian cinema”, egocentric icon of an industry which is reappeared from its rowdy charm. The guy is soon found by the autocratic regime of Abdel Fattah al-Sissi. And suddenly the star is forced to descend in a tone. Fares Fares falls the mask, fragile, pathetic, worried, almost transparent. His character phagocythe the star.

Laurent Lafitte of the day: Middle class

Impossible to escape Laurent Lafitte this year in Cannes. On Saturday, he climbed the steps to Marcel and Mr. Pagnolwhere he made the voice of Marcel Pagnol Adult. On Sunday, he was also on the red carpet to The richest woman in the world by Thierry Klifa, where he embodies the photographer who seduces Isabelle Huppert. Monday, he presented the comedy Middle class to the fifteen of filmmakers. And that’s not all. As a master of ceremonies, he will liven up the closing evening on Saturday after ensuring the opening. If we add the photocalls and the press conferences organized for the films of the official selection, the actor of the Comédie Française was on the bridge almost every day during this 78th edition of the festival.

In Middle classsort of Parasite Cheap but really hilarious, Lafitte plays a rich lawyer married to Elodie Bouchez who finds herself in conflict with the guardian couple (Ramzy Bédia and Laure Calamy) in charge of his sumptuous holiday home while he receives his daughter and his boyfriend (Noée Abita and Sami Outalbali), a young man of Algerian origin who has just finished his right. Playing a bourgeois asshole is almost too easy for him, as an embodied a mafia for Robert de Niro, but we revel in his uninhibited right -handed punchlines, which places Latin phrases in all his sentences and displays an incredible class contempt. “”Their job, stricto sensu, is to be at our disposal when we are there“;”You will clean the car in extenso. ”

The scene of the day: Splitsville by Michael Angelo Covino

The opportunities to split the pear or afford a good slice are quite rare in Cannes, so we welcomed the Splitsville by Michael Angelo Covino with all the more pleasure (The Climbselected at a certain look in 2019). This time he attacks the comedy of remarriage with Italian and French inspirations, where a quadra (Kyle Marvin) whose woman has just asked for divorce, discovers that if the marriage of her friends (Covino and Dakota Johnson) holds the distance, it is that they are in a free couple. A film that is constantly derailed, populated by tasty dialogues and crazy situations, including a hilarious Baston scene where Covino and Marvin escape for almost ten minutes.

The two friends start with slaps, then throw themselves on a coffee table, send a bowling ball to the face, take a break to save the fish from the aquarium they have just broken (with the bowling ball), swing each other in the stairs before defenesting and falling into the pool … It ends, and Covino, and Covino,Makes all their waterfalls (themselves)“. Tom Sweat Cruise.

The Cannes of the day: Idir Azougli in Weather

His first steps in the cinema, Idir Azougli made them in Cannes in 2018 in Shéhérazadethe film by Jean-Bernard Merlin who, after his discovery at the Critique Week, had finished triple Cesarized. Since then, he has not distinguished the big screen in a delirious manner but – like the most effective of the strain holders – the very large part of the feature films in which he participated found themselves on the Croisette. Northern tank And Stillwater In 2021, Marguerite’s theorem in 2023 and last year, Raw diamond Where he camped the boy’s boyfriend, a young woman in search of celebrity via reality TV.

This 2025 canes allows him to continue this tradition. Hubert Charge indeed chose it to be one of the central characters of Weatherits highly anticipated second long, eight years already after little peasant. A professional gleameor who, forced, after a n-th crazy plan with his best friend, to find a job to avoid prison, finds himself working in a nuclear trash can. At his own risk that this funny nickel -plated foot does not really measure. And much more than his playmate Paul Kircher, too tone on tone and therefore transparent compared to the atmosphere of the film.

It is indeed Idir Azougli who constantly gives the La la la de this portrait of youth in lack of future in the heart of France of the diagonal of the void. In the humor of his first minutes as in gravity which suddenly catches up with this little world to better engulf it. As soon as he leaves the screen, we get bored. As soon as it comes back, we know that something will happen. Traditions sometimes have good.

Today in Cannes

If we are curious, we will see Tell him that I like him to Romane Bohringer in a special session and we obviously go on Eleanor The Great (First realization of Scarlett Johansson). To relax, a small masterclass of Alain Chabat at the fortnight, before taking a look at Privacy by Rebecca Zlotowski out of competition. Before chaining on Indomitable from Thomas Ngijol to the fortnight, Love Me Tender With Vicky Krieps with a certain look, The disappearance of Josef Mengele From Kirill Serebrennikov to Cannes Première, A simple accident of Jafar Panahi and Fuer by Mario Martone in competition.

Subscribe to the newsletter first