Young French Cinema 2022: L’horizon
Director: Emilie Carpentier Run Time: 84 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2022
Starring: Alexis Baginama, Doréa Natalia Da Rozalia, Niia Hall, Sylvain Le Gall, Tracy Gotoas
Country: France
Language: French
L’horizon/The Horizon is presented at the Film Center and in our Virtual Screening Room as part of Young French Cinema.
Like most of her friends in the housing projects outside Paris, eighteen-year-old Adja’s focus is on having fun and getting through the days at her internship. But a fight over the farmland at the foot of her housing estate keeps encroaching on her carefree life: the government plans to evict the farmers from their land to build the biggest leisure complex in Europe. A group of activists have occupied the farmland and turned it into a ZAD, a zone to defend from environmentally reckless expansion. Adja and her influencer friend Sabira joke that the activists are tree-hugging hippies, but Adja can’t deny how she feels about Arthur, a farmer’s son on the front lines of the fight.
While writer-director Emilie Carpentier captures our attention—and emotions—with a charming tale of first love between two young people from different backgrounds, her real subject here is the dawning of political and social awareness at the cusp of maturity. In capturing Adja’s gradual decision to step up and fight for her future, she pays tribute to the courage of a generation for whom the fight for environmental justice is an urgent matter of survival.
Young French Cinema 2022 Program See our upcoming films