Season: CFS

Synopsis

Floria is an experienced nurse, a calming presence in a hospital system that’s anything but
calm. On a single late shift in an understaffed ward, routine care becomes a race against time
as patients deteriorate, families demand answers, colleagues are stretched thin, and every
interruption can mean life or death. As the night progresses, Floria’s professionalism is tested
to the limit by the sheer arithmetic of too many urgent needs and not enough hands on deck.

Context and Craft

Director Petra Volpe builds the film around immersion and momentum: rather than giving backstory or big plot twists, she keeps the camera close to Floria as the ward’s pressures
accumulate in near real time. The effect is less medical melodrama than workplace pressurecooker – think Boling Point but in a hospital – where the tension comes from triage i.e., what can
be done now, what must wait, and what that waiting costs. A key choice is the emphasis on systems over villains. No one person is “the problem”; the crisis is structural and includes
understaffing, bottlenecks, and there is a constant moral friction between ideal care and possible care. There is no time for small, human gestures (comforting a frightened patient, a
moment of tenderness) as everything is at stake when time runs out. The film was inspired by Madeline Calvelage’s book about nursing conditions, which helps explain the documentary-like
insistence on procedure, pace, and emotional labour, alongside a quietly thriller-ish edge created by the night’s escalating cascade of decisions.

Critical Reception

• “The pressure is on in a severely understaffed hospital, carried by Leonie Benesch’s
  committed performance.” — The Guardian
• “A cinematic tribute to nurses… elevated by the unflashy skill of Leonie Benesch.” —
  Sight and Sound.
• “Gripping, minimalist portrait that sneaks in a subtle thriller tension while staying
  focused on the psychological cost of caregiving.” — Financial Times

Conclusion

Late Shift is a study in care under constraint: a film that makes competence feel dramatic, and compassion feel expensive, not because it’s rare, but because the system gives it no room. By
narrowing the story to one shift, Volpe turns everyday hospital work into escalating suspense, while keeping the focus on Floria’s steady humanity and the quiet brutality of impossible workloads. It lands as both an intense viewing experience and a pointed piece of social realism.

Audience Rating: 8.31

Audience Comments:

• So depressing
• Probably the most important film I will see all year
• Best film I have seen in years
• A film everyone should see
• Sobering. Moving. What an insight into the nursing world.
• Deeply moving
• Awful music and terrible end, but it was an excellent portrayal of a real heroine.
• Harrowing

Synopsis

In a quiet Burgundy village, grandmother Michelle looks forward to time with her grandson — until an “innocent mistake” with foraged mushrooms shatters the fragile family dynamic. Is it
an accident, confusion, or something darker? As Michelle’s loneliness deepens, she finds unexpected companionship when her friend Marie-Claude’s son Vincent returns after prison,
drawing her into a web of affection, suspicion, and buried history.

Context and Craft

When Autumn Falls is one of Ozon’s characteristically slippery genre blends: part rural family drama, part “cosy” mystery, part psychological thriller. Tension is built less through plot
mechanics than through ambiguity. Village routines turn faintly menacing as accusations and motives blur. Reviewers have remarked on its classic French suspense influences (Claude
Chabrol/Georges Simenon) and on the film’s tonal tightrope: gentleness and warmth coexist with insinuation and dread. Much of the film’s power comes from performance and
withholding: Michelle’s inner life is readable yet unknowable, and key events are framed to keep moral certainty just out of reach.

Critical Reception

• “The implied Chabrol-esque horror is made to coexist with an odd mood of gentleness and even sentimentality as we witness the loneliness of an ageing woman with secrets
  and regrets in the autumn of her life.” — The Guardian
• “That it is still worthwhile owes largely to the sympathetic, sinuous performance of Hélène Vincent, in the lead role of a grand-mère who may not be as simply sweet as she
  first appears.” — Wall Street Journal
• “In the great Ozon catalogue, this seems like an incidental work… [yet] fascinating and the more you think about it, the more there is to think about.” — Mark Kermode

Conclusion

When Autumn Falls is less a straight mystery than a study in moral fog: a portrait of ageing, family resentment, and the stories people construct to live with guilt and desire. Ozon uses the
mushroom incident as a deceptively simple spark that exposes old fractures; he then lets uncertainty do the work, pushing viewers to constantly reassess Michelle, Valérie, and Vincent.
Whether you read it as a tender drama with sinister undertones or a thriller disguised as villagelife realism, it’s anchored by Hélène Vincent’s quietly commanding performance and Ozon’s
knack for making the ordinary feel menacing.

Audience Rating: 8.26

Audience Comments:

• A mushroom stew and two tarts. What a brilliant, dark meal of a film!
• Atmospheric, thought-provoking, emotive. 
• Fungi most fowl!
• It’s complicated, delightful, and nuanced.
• Loved it!
• A touching but unusual web of love and affection. Everyone covers up a possible crime, but out of it, love can flourish. Poignant and well-played. A superb film with so much going on. Well acted and leaves much unresolved. 
• Joyless
• Gentle & heartwarming
• Excellent. Unexpected at times. Extremely well acted and believable apart from the ending!
• Love and loss is a stormy sea

Synopsis

Mandatory Palestine, 1936. As Palestinian villages organise against British colonial rule amid
rising tensions and accelerating change, Yusuf drifts between the slower rhythms of his rural
home and the charged streets of Jerusalem, pulled into a widening revolt that will reshape lives
and futures.

Context and Craft

Jacir frames the story as historical drama with an ensemble sweep: personal stories threaded
through a broad political moment. Rather than centring only leaders or headline events, the film
uses Yusuf as a connective figure between village and city, ordinary life and organised
resistance, allowing the period to unfold through shifting relationships and competing
pressures. Formally, the film leans on period detail and a grounded, observational style, with
critics noting a tendency toward clear, explanatory beats designed to orient viewers in a
complex history. This is balanced with vivid scenes of daily life under strain. It’s also a film that
has sparked discussion about how cinema handles contested history. Some critics have
praised the film’s urgency and its attempt to foreground a chapter often under-taught in Britain,
while other commentators have argued that certain portrayals compress, simplify, or skew the
historical record.

Critical Reception

• “Emotionally stirring… heartfelt… if rather stolidly paced and sometimes pedagogically
  conveyed.” — The Guardian
• “Prescient… strong ensemble work, with one notably caricatured antagonist
  performance.” — Variety
• “Broad primer on a complex period, with attention to the political machinery on all
  sides.” — BFI Sight and Sound
  Conclusion
  Palestine 36 plays as both human drama and historical reckoning: a big-cast, big-canvas
  film that tries to make the beginnings of the 1936–39 revolt legible through one young man’s
  movement between worlds. For audiences, its impact may hinge on that balancing act,
  between immersion and instruction, story and history, especially given the real
  disagreements over interpretation that the film has provoked.

Audience Rating: 8.6

Audience Comments:

• Shocking and powerful
• Excellent as a film and explanation of how we’ve arrived at the current situation
• Deeply moving and necessary watch. Thank you for screening this.
• Heartbreaking
• A beautiful film that conveyed incredible emotion. So well depicted and just shows what too many of us is history not well known.
• A very difficult watch – but a necessary one. Haunting.
• Still happening after all these years. The injustice is shocking.

Synopsis

Paris, summer 1959. A young Jean-Luc Godard sets out to shoot À bout de souffle (Breathless),
a production that looks chaotic, improvised, and under-funded, but is driven by a fierce, almost
mischievous conviction that cinema can be made differently. Following the shoot day by day,
the film tracks the spark (and frictions) between Godard, his collaborators, and his stars Jean
Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo, capturing the moment just before a movie (and a movement)
rewired film history.

Context and Craft

Linklater approaches Nouvelle Vague as a ‘making-of’ film that doubles as a love letter to the
French New Wave, to a particular Parisian film culture, and to the DIY audacity of first features.
Cannes’ own write-up frames it as a cinephile’s declaration of love that recreates the period’s
methods and atmosphere. Linklater’s choices reinforce the “time-capsule” feel: the deliberate
imitation of mid-century film grammar and texture; a lovingly detailed re-staging of
the Breathless shoot rather than a modern re-interpretation. At the same time, the film’s big
idea is its tension: it honours Godard’s radicalism, but does so through a smoother, more
classical flow, making the film feel warm, witty, and accessible even when it’s depicting a
famously disruptive artist.

Critical Reception

• “A stylish, reverent homage that’s slick and cinephile-forward-admiring”. — The
  Guardian
• “Joyful tribute energy, dense with period knowledge and affection for the New Wave’s
  free spirits”. — BFI Sight and Sound
• ”A second look notes the ensemble’s charm… unmistakably a Linklater film even while
  saluting Godard.” — BFI Sight and Sound
• “An American director making a French-language, black-and-white film about a French
  cinematic “holy text,” and the care taken to recreate the original shoot.” — Reuters / AP

Audience Rating: 8.6

Comments:

Why not put on several New Wave films?

• Very stylish, but not knowing his films, story didn’t engage.
• Deliberately bizarre, not sure it worked
• Insight into filmmaking of the past. So natural
• Thankfully slept all the way through
• Not my favourite
• I missed out by not having seen Breathless
• As a director I really enjoyed this film, but not sure how much I would have enjoyed it otherwise.
• A great ending to the season’s films