‘La Gradiva’ Trailer: One of 2026’s Most Acclaimed Discoveries Puts a Fresh Twist on Coming-of-Age

Marine Atlan's directorial debut and Cannes Critics' Week prize winner narrowly missed out on repping France in the International Oscar race. It will win more critics' prizes stateside.

Marine Atlan’s directing debut “La Gradiva” quickly became one of 2026’s most acclaimed movies after winning the top prize at this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week. The coming-of-age story about a class of high school students traveling to Pompeii narrowly missed out on representing France in the Best International Feature Oscar race. The honor went instead to the Russian-language “Minotaur,” a multinational production that won the Grand Prize out of the Cannes competition.

Does that make “La Gradiva” this year’s “All We Imagine as Light,” a festival darling that similarly missed out on international placement at the 2025 Oscars? (India snubbed it for another film that wasn’t nominated, though other countries including France could’ve stepped in for it.) This wildly beloved festival movie should expect to win more critics’ prizes stateside as the year roars on. Next, it plays the New York Film Festival starting Sunday, September 27, ahead of its December release. Watch the trailer below.

Atlan previously worked as a cinematographer before directing and writing (with Anne Brouillet) “La Gradiva.” Here, she also serves as her own director of photography, and you can get a taste of the film’s sensuous visual style, its flair for Pompeii and the fading of postcard-pretty youth. Distributor 1-2 Special also releases the German International Oscar entry “Everytime,” directed by Sandra Wöllner, to similarly immense acclaim out of Cannes.

More from IndieWire’s “La Gradiva” review: “Mercifully free of typical high school movie tropes, the teenagers at the heart of Atlan’s film are fully realized people, whose fears and desires and ambitions and loneliness and dreams, as well as the intensity of their messy teenage feelings, are treated with utmost respect by Atland and co-writer Anne Brouillet, allowing their work to reach toward the sublime… Like the novel and the works it inspired, Atlan’s film is about the layers below our consciousness, where our desires and our fears and our anger boil until we can no longer contain them. But it’s also about the way that we project a version of ourselves to others, and the dangers of allowing our surface-level understanding of people to affect our judgments of them.”

“La Gradiva” opens in select theaters from 1-2 Special beginning December 18.