French director Marine Atlan presented her first feature La Gradiva at the Seminci film festival in Valladolid, Spain. The film follows French students on a trip to Naples and Pompeii. Atlan discussed a two-year casting process and how conversations with young people helped shape the characters and their concerns about the future.
Arts··Night
Atlan presents her first feature
Marine Atlan presented La Gradiva at the 71st Seminci festival in Valladolid, Spain, where the French-Italian film competes for the Golden Spike. Her first feature follows French students on a school trip to Naples and Pompeii. The film arrived in Valladolid after winning the Grand Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week.[1], [2]
The school trip provides a setting for the young characters’ conversations about education and the future as well as their experiences of solitude and growing up.[2]
Students helped shape the characters
Atlan and casting director Julie Sokolowski spent two years seeking performers in schools, streets and demonstrations. Some of the cast are students rather than professional actors. Atlan said conversations about politics, ecology, feminism, love and education helped her reshape characters around the young performers’ views and abilities.[2]
At Valladolid, Atlan linked the concerns of young people to protests in France. She said demonstrators were calling for greater equality and questioned the promise that schooling alone ensures social advancement. She also described a polarized generation, contrasting young people on the left who take to the streets with a radicalizing right. These are the director’s assessments of the political context surrounding the film.[2]
Naples, memory and an uncertain future
Toni, played by Colas Quignard, has family roots in Naples and searches for traces of his past while classmates consider their futures. The students await higher-education admission decisions. Atlan criticized France’s Parcoursup platform as opaque and a mechanism of social selection.[2]
Atlan said Naples offered a lively, sensory environment, while Vesuvius brought a sense of mortality and fragility. She described the region’s geological layers and rebuilt settlements as traces of time. In editing, the filmmakers balanced long and shorter scenes to let viewers inhabit moments without losing the characters’ narrative threads. She also discussed the influence of filmmaker Roberto Rossellini on her view of the region. The French-Italian film runs 145 minutes. Atlan connected Jensen’s image of Gradiva with what an image can hold: fantasies, buried memories and denial. She related that idea to Toni’s journey through the city.[2]
The festival interview also addressed the film’s changing form. Atlan said the first cut ran four hours. The later part uses longer takes and a more distant perspective; she wanted the shortened version to preserve multiple young characters rather than concentrate on one protagonist.[1]
