Selected for this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, Louise Hémon‘s The Girl In The Snow continues to wow auds — it has now claimed the 2025 André Bazin Prize. The editorial staff of Cahiers du Cinéma essentially hand off a short list to a jury composed of six film individuals a filmmaker, an actress, an editor of the magazine, a writer, a film technician, and a subscriber. This year Rebecca Zlotowski was the selected filmmaker. Previous winners (all of these were also presented in the Directors’ Fortnight) include Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, Pham Thiên’s Ân Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell and Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road. From our Cannes by Nicholas Bell review:
Almost lazily sinister, the drastic juxtapositions between night and day highlight the teacher’s dwindling abilities to shed light into dark hearts and superstitious beliefs, eventually to her own detriment. It has all the essence of a horror narrative and, yet, Hémon keeps an icy, observational distance, as if the film itself is destined to remain in a permanent state of defrost.
This film conjures up a place that inhabits us as much as it is inhabited.
It takes shape in the compact snow, the hypnotic wind, the dull wood, the thick paper, the skin reddened by the cold or the flames. It focuses on rarely represented faces and dialects, bringing together professional actors and local residents. Its subject matter is both concrete and imaginary, for in this mountain at the turn of the 20th century, stories fill the nights and haunt the tongues. The closed door opens to mental journeys.
The film surprises in its portrayal of this microcosm disrupted by the arrival of a young teacher bringing with her the ideas of the Third Republic. We witness neither the modernization of a rural population nor the awakening of a city girl through contact with rustic sensuality. The director excels at creating areas of ambiguity and surprise, like the coffin that is not buried but nailed to a roof, waiting for the thaw. The filmmaker blurs the lines between the forces at play. The staging embraces silence and opacity, to the point that a fantastical vibration pervades this alpine western. The vulnerability of men and women in the face of sexuality is reversed and blurred. The Republic loses its Cartesian pomp to convey impulses of eroticism and death. Thus, colonized Algeria becomes a place haunted by ghosts. The heroine’s civilizing mission, supposed to bring light to the most remote peoples, takes on a striking ambivalence. It echoes both the fears and the possibilities of our contemporary world, where legitimate institutions and knowledge are faltering. This is a debut film that resembles its protagonist: its restraint is not prudish, but rather the cover for a determined, powerful, enigmatic temperament. And in a year when only 24% of French films were directed by women, Louise Hémon’s The Girl In The Snow masterfully demonstrates how female directors are revitalizing fiction on our screens.
2024 : Joanna Arnow The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
2023 : Pham Thiên Ân Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
2022 : Panah Panahi Hit the Road
