Discoveries Await: Critics’ Week 2025

Closing out the sixty-fourth edition of the program organized by the French Union of Film Critics and focusing on first and second features will be Momoko Seto’s animated Dandelion’s Odyssey, in which four floating seeds wander the planet in search of a place to take root following a nuclear holocaust. “The anthropocentric view of nature and the hierarchy between living things established by humans have always seemed alien to me,” says Seto.

Two more films will screen out of competition, both of them comedies. In Baise-en-ville, director Martin Jauvat plays Sprite, a twenty-five-year-old who lands a job cleaning villas—but he has no driving license, never mind a car. His creative solution will rely on a dating app and a healthy dose of charm.

In Alice Douard’s Love Letters, Ella Rumpf and Monia Chokri play a married couple who tumble into a series of misadventures while expecting their first child. Critics’ Week artistic director Ava Cahen calls Douard’s first feature a “witty, tender film that skillfully conjures a novelistic feel.”

Of the seven films lined up for this year’s competition, the one generating the most anticipation so far is Left-Handed Girl, the first feature to be directed by Shih-Ching Tsou, who has been working with Sean Baker since they collaborated on his second feature, Take Out (2004). Baker, who won the Palme d’Or last year for Anora, has edited and coproduced Left-Handed Girl, the story of a single mother who returns to Taipei with her two daughters. “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,” Cahen tells Deadline’s Melanie Goodfellow. “The editing of the film is exceptional, the direction is very powerful, and above all, this film has a frenetic pace, a crazy pace.”

Goodfellow also talks with Estelle de Araujo and Samuel Blanc of The Party Film Sales, the company that has picked up international sales rights to Sven Bresser’s first feature, Reedland. First-time actor Gerrit Knobbe plays a farmer who discovers the lifeless body of a girl on his land. De Araujo and Blanc call Reedland “a haunting, complex, mysterious, and fascinating film . . . It is extremely impressive how Sven’s filmmaking confidence and maturity are already those of an accomplished filmmaker, and how he puts them at the service of unsettling us continuously while exploring in depth the human soul and our relationships to others, modernity, and the living.”

De Araujo and Blanc have also taken rights to Pauline Loquès’s Nino, featuring Théodore Pellerin (Lurker) as a young man setting out in Paris to complete two tasks assigned to him by his doctors. Nino is an “immensely delicate generational portrait,” De Araujo and Blanc tell Variety’s Elsa Keslassy. Loquès’s first feature tackles the “importance of our bonds to each other, and how they are an instrument for building a hopeful future.”

March (Wisarut Himmarat) is mourning the wife he’s lost to dust pollution when he discovers that she’s returned as a vacuum cleaner in A Useful Ghost, the first feature from Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke. “Despite Thailand being well-known for making scary horror films, A Useful Ghost does not try to frighten or scare the audiences; instead, it provokes them to think about the relationship between human and ghost in our society,” the director tells Keslassy. “Do ghosts need the living to exist? How do ghosts work? Do ghosts pay the rent themselves? These were a few of the silly questions popping in my head when I first started the project years ago.”

Fifteen-year-old Toni is a proud member of a family of scrap dealers in Cañada Real—Europe’s largest illegal slum, located on the outskirts of Madrid—in Guillermo García López’s Sleepless City. As demolition companies start closing in on their territory, the family splits, with some deciding to leave and others refusing to budge. Toni has a choice to make.

Manon Clavel stars in Alexe Poukine’s Kika as a woman pregnant with her second child when her partner suddenly dies. Kika has no time to mourn. She needs to figure out how to make money—fast. “Kika is a continuation of my reflections on the female body as a site of social injunctions, but also of liberation,” says Poukine. “Kika doesn’t wait to be saved. For me, it’s a tale of empowerment that doesn’t promote domination but the power of gentleness and vulnerability.”

Déni Oumar Pitsaev’s Imago is the single nonfiction film in competition. In his first feature, Pitsaev contemplates leaving his native Chechnya to build a house on a patch of land in Georgia at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains known as “the Jihadists’ valley.” But he wonders: “How could I possibly live in such a place?”