Marine Atlan's "La Gradiva," winner of the Grand Prize at the 2026 Cannes Critics' Week, has released its first U.S. trailer ahead of a December 18 theatrical release from distributor 1-2 Special.

The film will screen at the New York Film Festival before its release. It is the directorial debut of Atlan, a cinematographer whose credits include "Jessica Forever" and "The Girl in the Snow." Atlan also serves as her own cinematographer on the feature.

"La Gradiva" follows a group of French high schoolers on a trip to Naples and the sites around Pompeii, where their desires and frustrations collide with escalating tension. The New York Film Festival synopsis describes the trip as "a multifaceted, revelatory experience" in an "exceptionally accomplished feature debut."

The cast centers on four characters. Colas Quignard plays Toni, a troubled working-class teenager who believes, based on family lore, that he is related to an aristocratic Neapolitan family. Mitia Capellier-Audat plays James, described as a "preternaturally self-composed lothario." Suzanne Gerin plays Suzanne, melancholy yet coolheaded, who feels invisible. Antonia Buresi plays Mme. Mercier, the group's animated yet wearied Latin teacher.

The synopsis notes that the characters gain "an almost mythic grandeur" when set against "the historical continuum of love and death that defines the history of the region," with the students visiting frescoes, museums, and volcanic sites near Pompeii.

Martin Tsai, reviewing the film at Cannes in a Critic's Pick for The Film Stage, praised Atlan's refusal of genre conventions. "Marine Atlan's 'La Gradiva' begins from a familiar cinematic premise: a school trip abroad for a busload of restless teenagers temporarily freed from the surveillance of home," Tsai wrote. "Yet the film steadily slips from the gravitational pull of genre."

Tsai argued the film resists the usual architectures of the teen movie — "locker-room farce, hormonal panic, slasher-movie bloodshed" — as well as the "issue-oriented earnestness" of coming-out narratives or school-shooting dramas. Instead, he wrote, Atlan's debut "concerns itself with something more elusive and difficult to dramatize: the murky psychological territory between childhood and adulthood, where identity is still provisional and intimacy shifts shape by the hour."

While the characters "resemble recognizable archetypes — the brooding outsider, the sexually adventurous couple, the shy observer," Tsai wrote that they "never calcify into caricature." He concluded: "The dynamics remain unstable, constantly rearranging themselves with the volatility of adolescence itself."

The trailer arrives shortly after the film's poster premiere. With its New York Film Festival berth, a Cannes Grand Prize, and a year-end release date, "La Gradiva" positions Atlan — already established behind the camera — as a debut director to watch this awards season.