Directors’ Fortnight and ACID 2025 Lineups

Announcing the lineup on Tuesday for the Fortnight’s fifty-seventh edition (May 14 through 22), artistic director Julien Rejl called Miroirs “a kind of melodrama, very mysterious, but with the same great direction, precision, and elegance that makes the charm of Christian Petzold’s cinema.” Taking its name from the third movement of a suite for solo piano composed by Maurice Ravel, Miroirs stars Paula Beer (Transit, Undine, Afire), and the rest of the cast features actors who have previously worked with Petzold as well: Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, and Enno Trebs.

Beer plays Laura, a pianist studying at the Berlin University of the Arts. She feels that both her life and her music have come to a standstill, and one afternoon, she and her boyfriend take a drive out into the countryside. An accident instantly kills her boyfriend, but Laura miraculously emerges unscathed. A woman who has witnessed the wreck invites Laura to her family home to recover. Shaken, Laura accepts and finds after a few days that the family’s company is doing her good, and the feeling seems to be mutual. But Laura eventually begins to suspect that something is terribly off with these people.

Cineuropa’s Fabien Lemercier points out that six of the eighteen features lined up for this year’s Fortnight come from French filmmakers, beginning with the opening night film, Enzo. Laurent Cantet (The Class) was working on the project when he died last April, and his friend Robin Campillo, the director of BPM (Beats Per Minute), stepped in to complete it. The story centers on a sixteen-year-old who sets up a masonry apprenticeship in the south of France and meets a charismatic Ukrainian worker who opens up a new world to him.

Enzo is “a magnificent tale of adolescence focused on the character of an elusive young man,” Rejl tells Deadline’s Melanie Goodfellow. “It’s a film that moved us deeply, and I felt there was no other place for it than to present it as the opening of this Fortnight.” Talking to Screen’s Rebecca Leffler, Rejl calls Enzo “quite simply the most beautiful French film we’ve seen this year, and Robin Campillo is among the greatest contemporary directors alive today.”

Young, popular, and engaged, Yasmine is rattled by her new, charming, and headstrong friend, Carmen, in Prïncia Car’s Boys Only, while in Julia Kowalski’s Her Will Be Done, Nawojka finds her ferocious desire leading her to a sultry neighbor, Sandra. Wealthy Parisian holiday home owners clash with their housekeepers in Antony Cordier’s The Party’s Over, a teacher arrives in a tiny village in the heart of the French Alps in 1899 in Louise Hémon’s The Girl in the Snow, and a commissioner investigates the murder of a police officer in Cameroon in Thomas Ngijol’s Indomptables.

Siblings reunite in Tokyo years after the death of their mother in Brand New Landscape, and Rejl calls Yuiga Danzuka’s first feature “a little miracle . . . The finesse with which it depicts family and filial relationships recalls the beauty and emotional richness of Ozu’s cinema.” Lee Sang-il’s Kokuho is the story of Kikuo (Ryo Yoshizawa), the son of gangsters who discovers his talent—and a new life—as a kabuki actor. Female figure skaters face off in Jinghao Zhou’s Girl on Edge, and Rejl suggests that the thriller “echoes Aronofsky’s Black Swan.”

In Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a nine-year-old has no choice but to bake a birthday gift in Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake. A New York City delivery worker’s bike is stolen just before his family is due to arrive in Lloyd Lee Choi’s Lucky Lu. Anne Émond’s Peak Everything is the story of the love between a kindhearted but borderline depressed kennel owner and the radiant woman he meets while buying a therapeutic solar lamp. A boxer struggles to recover from a near-fatal accident in Valéry Carnoy’s Wild Foxes, and a serial killer has a thing for sharks in Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals.

Militantropos, directed by Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova, and Simon Mozgovyi—and the only nonfiction film in the lineup—is a study of life in Ukraine three years after Putin’s invasion. In Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s Death Does Not Exist, this year’s single animated feature, an activist abandons her colleagues when their attack on a wealthy target fails. Alone in the wilderness, she’s haunted by a former member of the group.

Of all the eighteen features, the only one that isn’t a premiere will be the Fortnight’s closing night film. Comedian Eva Victor’s viral videos caught the eye of Barry Jenkins, who produced her first feature, Sorry, Baby, the winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance. Reviewing this “meticulously crafted wonder” for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson wrote that Victor “maintains the oddball humor that first endeared her to her followers, but she also incorporates whole other, previously unseen facets of her considerable talent. Sorry, Baby is funny, sad, thoughtful, and specific, a keenly observed portrait of a woman blown off course by a traumatic incident.”

The Association du Cinéma Indépendant pour sa Diffusion, a group of filmmakers promoting the distribution of indie films since 1992, also rolled out the lineup for its Cannes sidebar on Tuesday. ACID 2025 will open on May 14 with Sophie Letourneur’s L’aventura, the story of a family’s summer holiday in Sardinia as told by eleven-year-old Claudine.

Three of the nine features in the program are documentaries. Fatem, a Palestinian woman, is director Sepideh Farsi’s “eyes in Gaza” in Put Your Soul On and Walk; Namir Abdel Messeeh aims to keep his mother’s memory alive in Life After Siham; and Sylvain George traces the lives of young exiles in Paris in Obscure Night: “Ain’t I a Child?”

“Before meeting you,” ACID general delegate Pauline Ginot tells Marta Bałaga in Variety, “I talked to someone and they kept asking me: ‘What’s the main theme?’ Telling stories in a different way—that’s our only theme. I think it’s quite precious for filmmakers to have a place like that in Cannes.”