Directors’ Fortnight will open its 57th edition with Enzo, written and developed by late Cannes d’Or winner Laurent Cantet before his death last April and directed by friend and collaborator Robin Campillo.
The film is among 18 features announced for the 2025 line-up of the Cannes parallel section – overseen by the French Directors Guild (Société des Réalisateurs de Films) – at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday.
Big screen debutant Eloy Pohu Enzo stars as the titular 16-year-old protagonist who defies his bourgeois family’s expectations by starting a masonry apprenticeship, which brings him into contact with charismatic Ukrainian workmate Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi). Elodie Bouchez and Pierfrancesco Favino also feature in the cast.
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Cantet, who won the Palme d’Or for The Class in 2008, had been due to shoot the film last August. Campillo, who made waves in Cannes with 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute), picked up the directorial baton following the death of his friend, who he first met when they were film school students in the 1980s. It is produced by Anatomy of a Fall producer Marie-Ange Luciani under the banner of Les Films de Pierre.
It is the second consecutive year Directors’ Fortnight has opened with a posthumous film, after Sophie Fillières’ final feature This Life of Mine, starring Agnès Jaoui as a woman whose sense of self starts to unravel as she turns 55, kicked off the section in 2024.
The section will close with Eva Victor’s drama Sorry, Baby, about an academic dealing with a traumatic event, which premiered in Sundance earlier this year and sparked a bidding war, won by A24.
Also from the U.S., is Lloyd Lee Choi’s first feature Lucky Lu. Taiwanese actor Chang Chen (Happy Together) stars as a Chinese delivery driver in New York whose e-bike, and main means of making a living, is stolen just as his family are due to join him in the U.S. after many years apart.
Out of Canada, French Canadian director Anne Émond’s Peak Everything about a kennel owner who falls for a customer service representative and decides to track her down.
Eight of the selected features are first films but established directors have also made the cut including German director Christian Petzold with melodrama Miroirs n° 3 about a piano student from Berlin, who miraculously survives a car crash during a weekend trip to the countryside and is then taken in by a local family.
Continuing the section’s tradition of showcasing genre, the line-up also includes Australian director Sean Byrne’s IFC and Shudder-acquired thriller Dangerous Animals starring Hassie Harrison as a free-spirited surfer who is abducted by shark-obsessed serial killer and held on his boat.
The section will also debut animated feature Death Does Not Exist by French director Félix Dufour-Laperrière. It follows young political activist Helen who abandons her accomplices after a failed armed attack to overthrow figures of the establishment in their sumptuous villa and revisits her intimate and political choices as she hides out in the surrounding forest.
Documentary also features in the line-up with Ukrainian directors Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova and Simon Mozgovyi’s hard-hitting work Militantropos investigating the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on personal behavior as people adjust to life of combat and resistance.
As ever, there is a strong French presence with Anthony Cordier’s class-war comedy and fourth feature Middle Class, featuring an ensemble cast led by Laurent Lafitte, Elodie Bouchez and Laure Calamy; Louise Hémon’s alpine-set psychological thriller The Girl in the Snow; Thomas Ngijol’s Cameroon-set detective thriller Indomptables, and Prïncia Car’s female-driven drama The Girls We Want, featuring an amateur cast and shot in Marseille.
Films from territories seen more rarely on the big screen include Iraqi director Hasan Hadi’s The President’s Cake set in Iraq’s little filmed marshes area against the backdrop of President Saddam Hussein rule in the 1990s. At a time when the population is suffering from food shortages, a young girl finds herself obliged to make a birthday cake for her school mates to celebrate the president’s birthday.
Feature Selection
Enzo – OPENING FILMDirs. Laurent Cantet & Robin Campillo
Peak EverythingDir. Anne Émond
Brand New Landscape *Dir. Yuiga Danzuka
Middle ClassDir. Anthony Cordier
Dangerous AnimalsDir. Sean Byrne
The Foxes Round *Dir. Valéry Carnoy
The Girl in the Snow *Dir. Louise Hémon
The Girls We Want *Dir. Prïncia Car
Girl on Edge *Dir. Jinghao Zhou
IndomptablesDir. Thomas Ngijol
KokuhoDir. Lee Sang-il
Lucky Lu *Dir. Lloyd Lee Choi
MilitantroposDir. Yelizaveta Smith, Alina Gorlova & Simon Mozgovyi
Miroirs n° 3Dir. Christian Petzold
Death Does Not Exist (La Mort N’Existe Pas)Dir. Félix Dufour-Laperrière
The President’s Cake *Dir. Hasan Hadi
Que Ma Volonté Soit FaiteDir. Julia Kowalski
Sorry, Baby * – CLOSING FILMDir. Eva Victor
Short and Medium Length Films
+10KDir. Gala Hernández López
Before The Sea ForgetsDir. Ngọc Duy Lê
The BodyDir. Louris van de Geer
Bread Will WalkDir. Alex Boya
Blue HeartDir. Samuel Suffren
KarmashDir. Aleem Bukhari
LoynesDir. Dorian Jespers
Death of the FishDir. Eva Lusbaronian
Nervous EnergyDir. Eve Liu
When The Geese FlewDir. Arthur Gay
The post Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Unveils 2025 Line-Up; ‘Enzo’ Opener & ‘Sorry, Baby’ Closer appeared first on Deadline.
