Rebecca (Anamaria Vartolomei) wants the best for her child. However, she hurts him. In Adam’s interestthis young mother refuses to properly feed her son, convinced that the food proposed by the hospital would be harmful to him. Adam, who suffers from serious shortcomings, refuses to eat if his mother is not present.
The immersive film by Belgian filmmaker Laura Wandel follows the chief nurse of the pediatric emergencies, who takes care of Adam and embodied by Léa Drucker. While child protection would like to withdraw custody in Rebecca, the nurse, Lucie, struggles to make reason for the single mother and avoid a traumatic separation for her and her child. In filigree, the film therefore tells the hospital in crisis and overwhelmed care staff, but also the way in which isolated mothers lack accompaniment.
Every year, the festival programming reveals trends, recurring themes and resonances between the many films present. And if we believe the vintage of this 78e edition, children (and their parents) are not doing well. Adam’s interest was opening the criticism week at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and he actually set the tone: it was only the first of the many accounts present this year at the Festival to talk about complicated maternity.
Saturday, May 17, late evening, was screened the new film by Lynne Ramsay, Die, My Love (in competition). With Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson featured, he tells the descent towards the madness of a young mother with postpartum depression. Director of We need to talk about Kevin (2011) and A Beautiful Day (Prix du Scénario in Cannes in 2017), Lynne Ramsay delivers a new violent, dark and maximalist story, which ends up exhausting the spectator. With a lot of saturated sound passages (being in Cannes, one wonders if the mixing was final) and shock scenes, the British filmmaker paints a terrifying and sensationalist portrait of post-party life.
Lesbian mothers and substitution mothers
Evidence of lovealso presented at the Critics Week, tells how Céline (Ella Rumpf), lesbian, is preparing to become a mother with her partner Nadia (Monia Chokri): not being pregnant, she will have to adopt her own daughter. Alice Douard’s feature film underlines the specific injustice experienced by lesbian mothers, who must administratively prove their investment in the life of their child.
But this film also illustrates with great humor all the derogatory questions and remarks that the future parents must face. A few days later, in the Un certain Look section, the festival will also project Love Me Tenderwith Vicky Krieps, adapted from the eponymous novel of Constance Debré published in 2020. We follow the Kafkaiian course of a single mother, who loses custody of her son when her ex-husband learns that she is lesbian and will have to fight to see him again.
There are also mothers of substitution, those who lost their child or have moved away from it. This is the case in Promised the sky (A certain look), very nice film by Erige Sehiri, which speaks of intra-African migration, through the account of several women, most of them in an irregular situation, installed in Tunisia. Among them, Naney, who left her teenage daughter in Côte d’Ivoire before emigrating, or Marie, Ivorian pastor, who collects little Kenza, a survivor of a shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea.
Children in pain
Kenza, who lost his parents, is not the only child in pain. In Sound of FallingGerman film by Mascha Schilinski presented in competition, we follow the fate of four girls who lived on the same farm in Eastern Germany to different eras. The abstract construction of the film creates echoes and parallels between the characters. But one of the themes that binds them is in particular the suffering linked to their condition and sexual violence inflicted by men.
There is also Estéban (Bruno Núñez), the young character of the superb Sirātsigned by the Franco-Spanish filmmaker óliver Laxe and also in competition. This boy accompanies his father in a journey in the middle of the Moroccan desert in the hope of finding his missing sister. Or Fuki (Yui Suzuki), 11, the heroine of Renoir. This beautiful film by Japanese director Chie Hayakawa, competition for the Palme d’Or, takes us to the inner world of the little girl, whose father is suffering from terminal cancer.
It is also a childish initiatory story that offers The President’s Cakeselected by the fifteen of filmmakers. Sort of Ferris Bueller Iraqi, Hasan Hadi’s film takes place in the 1990s and recounts the crazy day of a little girl drawn by her school to prepare a cake, to celebrate the birthday of dictator Saddam Hussein. While the country is struck by an intense famine, finding the ingredients will turn into a perilous adventure for the young Lamia.
In Die, My Lovea benevolent neighbor from Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) tells him that we are not talking about the postpartum depression or the difficulties of maternity. Relentless (and this is one of its tastiest characteristics), the character of Jennifer Lawrence retorts to him that on the contrary, we only talk about that permanently. Indeed, in a few years, works, films, series or podcasts offering a more realistic look at the experience of maternity (or parenting) have multiplied. A release of speech that may have inspired, indirectly, the many cinematographic projects present in Cannes this year.
If parenting is far from being a new theme in the cinema, the proposals seen at the festival find a way to interpret it new ways and tell stories still too little, if never heard. And it’s not over: the 78 competitione Cannes Film Festival will end with the new film of the Dardenne brothers, Young peoplewhich follows five women and their children in a accommodation center.
