Selected for the Directors’ Fortnight in 2022, Charlotte Le Bon‘s assured directorial debut was among the highlights of the section and since its launch on the Croisette, Falcon Lake has played well on the festival circuit (with Deauville and TIFF), and among the collection of prizes it landed the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Film (beating out Alice Diop’s Saint Omer which oddly won for Best Feature ex aequo with Pacifiction).
Working as both as a moody parable and troubling portrait on youth, while we do indeed find some ghostly elements injected here, Falcon Lake is more about hard to describe violence that is associated to first loves and not being personally equipped to deal with rejection. After working as an actress for more than a decade, Le Bon uses the text of Bastien Vivès’ graphic novel Une sœur but maps out a film that works from a more personal terrain within the parameters of the coming-of-age genre, but with a very much grown up text. I had the chance to sit down with the filmmaker (some parts we switched from English to French) back in Cannes. Yellow Veil Pictures launched Falcon Lake this month.
