Cannes Critics’ Week unveils 2025 selection | News

Cannes Critics’ Week, the festival sidebar spotlighting first and second features, has revealed the 11 competition and special screenings titles for its 64th edition running May 14-22.

Scroll down for full list of titles

Seven films will vie for four top prizes in competition, awarded by a jury helmed by Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Sorogoyen. Five of those are first films that will compete for the Camera d’Or. Six films in the line-up are directed by women.

Ava Cahen, now in her fourth year as artistic director, told Screen this year’s selection is “a daring combination of films with panache that celebrates new voices.” 

The sidebar will open with Belgian filmmaker Laura Wandel’s second feature Adam’s Interest, set in a hospital paediatric ward and centred on a distraught mother, her malnourished son and the nurse who looks after them. It stars Léa Drucker and Anamaria Vartolomei. Indie Sales is handling international sales and Memento Distribution will release in France. 

Critics’ Week will close with Japanese director Momoko Seto’s animated feature Dandelion’s Odyssey about the journey of four dandelions who survive a nuclear explosion and search for a place to replant. Like another Cannes-premiering animation Flow, it is dialogue-free, but Cahen told Screen it has “a radically different, more experimental visual style” and “is completely unique in how it is able to give plants and mushrooms emotions.” It is also on Indie Sales’ slate.

Love Letters, Alice Douard’s comedy-drama about newfangled motherhood starring Ella Rumpf, Monia Chokri and Noémie Lvovsky, will get a special screening. Set just after France legalised same-sex marriage over a decade ago, the film is about a woman whose partner is about to give birth to the couple’s first child and must prove to authorities she will be a “good mother” in order to officially adopt the baby. Pulsar Content handles sales.

Also screening out of competition is Martin Jauvat’s second feature Baise-En-Ville which stars the filmmaker alongside Emmanuelle Bercot and William Lebghil in a story about a 20-something man who returns to his hometown after a break-up and has to take his driving test. Cahen described it as “a quirky road movie comedy brimming with intelligence”.

Competition

Shih-Ching Tsou, who co-directed 2004’s Take Out with Sean Baker, has co-written her debut fiction feature Left-Handed Girl with Baker who is also the film’s editor. It is about a single mother and her two daughters who return to Taipei from the countryside to open a stand at a buzzing night market as generations of family secrets unravel. The UK’s Good Chaos and Left-Handed Film produce and Le Pacte handles international sales.

From Thailand, Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke enters the competition with A Useful Ghost, a first feature blending social satire and romantic comedy about ghosts who are reincarnated as household appliances and stir up trouble.

The line-up features three titles from French first-time directors. In addition to Douard, Alexe Poukine and Pauline Loquès compete with their debut fiction features, Kika and Nino.

Poukine’s Kika stars Manon Clavel as a woman who, pregnant with her second child and dealing with the aftermath of the sudden death of her partner, must find a way to make ends meet and move forward. “It’s about how a single mother gets knocked down and finds a way to get back up again,” Cahen said.

Loquès’ Nino follows a adolescent man with a life-altering decision to make over three days that Cahen compared to “a modern-day Cleo From 5 To 7”. The Party handles sales.

Chechen filmmaker Déni Oumar Pitsaev’s debut documentary Imago is an autobiographical tale set in a Georgian valley bordering Chechnya where the filmmaker attempts to build a house marrying futuristic design and local tradition.

Dutch director Sven Bresser’s Reedland, which passed through Les Arcs Work in Progress, is about a reed cutter who finds the body of a murdered girl and sets out on a quest to track down evil.

Rounding out the competition is Spanish director Guillermo Galoe’s Sleepless City, a buddy movie shot in Madrid’s La Caňada Real shanty town about two inseparable friends who are forced to say goodbye when one moves away.

Discussing this year’s selection, Cahen described “a love story between Critics’ Week and Belgian cinema”. Belgium is a co-producer on five of the 11 films in selection and France produced or co-produced 10 of the 11 titles.

She also cited filmmakers in this year’s official selection like Julia Ducournau, Hafsia Herzi, Alex Lutz and Hubert Charuel who all had their early starts at Critics’ Week. “That’s the whole point of everything we do. We discover a film and meet the filmmaker behind it and try to see beyond that. We are thrilled to ‘reveal’ our alumni to the world and it brings tears to our eyes when they confirm their talent.”

Cahen also said there is “a diversity of aesthetics and perspectives” among both the selection and this year’s jury, which also includes UK actor Daniel Kaluuya, Moroccan journalist Jihane Bougrine, French-Canadian director of photography Josée Deshaies and Indonesian producer Yulia Evina Bhara.

Critics’ Week 2025

*first film

Competition