The Cannes Film Festival’s La Résidence is welcoming Anna Llargués Muñoz, Vytautas Katkus, Sam Manacsa, Ananth Subramaniam, Agustina Sánchez Gavier, and Dorian Jespers to their 52nd session. It’s a major helping hand in the development of what, for the most part, are feature film debuts — only Katkus will be working on his sophomore feature project. We’ll be keeping a close eye on where these filmmakers end up with their future projects. Here are their bios:
Anna Llargués Muñoz was born in Barcelona in 1999. Her debut short film, Trenc d’alba (Crack of Dawn), a fiction blending digital, Super 8 and archival footage, premiered in La Cinef Selection at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. It was also selected for the 68th Valladolid International Film Festival (Seminci), where it received a Special Mention from the Green Spike Jury. The film screened at around fifty film festivals and received multiple awards. Her second fiction short film, Àvia Peix (Grandma Fish), shot by its nine-year-old protagonist, is now starting its festival run. She is currently developing her debut feature, De fang (Of Mud), a Spain–France–Portugal coproduction, which was granted an award at Les Arcs Talent Village and was selected for TorinoFilmLab Green Narratives. Anna’s films explore cinema as a vessel for memory, tracing the invisible threads that connect people, different forms of life and places across time.
Vytautas Katkus is a director and cinematographer based in Vilnius. He graduated from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in cinematography and works in fiction and documentary films. He shot Saule Bliuvaite’s debut movie Toxic, which won Golden Leopard at Locarno 2024 and national film award for best cinematography. As director he has made 3 short films : Community Gardens,Places, and Cherries, and showed them in many festivals (Cannes competition, Critic’s week, Venice). His debut feature film The Visitor premiered in Karlovy Vary and won best director award in 2025. He also won national awards for best screenplay, best director, and best film. He is now developing his second feature film.
Sam Manacsa is a Filipino filmmaker whose work spans multiple disciplines. She has worked in production design for award-winning films, including Carlo Francisco Manatad’s Whether the Weather Is Fine (Locarno, 2021) and Siyou Tan’s Amoeba (TIFF, 2025). Her short film Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (2023) had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti section, while If People Such as We Cease to Exist (2016) was selected for the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival’s International Competition. She is currently developing her debut feature, The Void is Immense in Idle Hours, which was selected for the TorinoFilmLab FeatureLab. She is an alumna of the SEAFIC Seed Lab (2022), TIFF Directors’ Lab (2025), and Talents Tokyo (2025).
Ananth Subramaniam is a Malaysian filmmaker of Tamil descent whose work explores themes of ancestral identity through the lens of post-colonial Tamil experiences. In 2025, his film Bleat! became the first Malaysian short selected at Cannes, premiering at the 64th Critics’ Week and winning the Queer Palm. The film also won the International Student Jury Prize at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, was selected for MoMA’s New Directors/New Films program, and screened at more than 30 festivals worldwide. His latest short, Holy Crowd, premiered at 2026 Cannes Critics’ Week. His other short films include The House of Brick & Stone (2022) and Liar Land (2019), the latter of which received a Special Mention at the 73rd Locarno Film Festival. Ananth is in development for his debut feature, Pray to the Thunder, through Talents Tokyo, in collaboration with Berlinale Talents, Critics’ Week Next Step program and La Résidence du Festival de Cannes.
Agustina Sánchez Gavier is an Argentinian writer and filmmaker based in Germany. She graduated from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) in 2023. Her graduation film, Nuestra Sombra (Our Own Shadow, 2024), premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight at the 77th Festival de Cannes and went on to screen at over 70 international film festivals, receiving several awards and distinctions. The film was nominated for the German Film Award and broadcast by ARTE. Nuestra Sombra grew out of the research for her debut feature, Mártires (Martyrs), currently in development.
Dorian Jespers (b. 1993, Brussels) is a filmmaker trained at INSAS, KASK, and Le Fresnoy. His two short films travelled widely, screening at more than 200 festivals worldwide (Cannes, Clermont, Palm Springs, Karlovy Vary…) and winning over 35 awards. Sun Dog, inspired by a surreal journey through the Russian Arctic, won the main prize in Rotterdam; Loynes, drawn from an obscure court case stretching from nineteenth-century Liverpool to contemporary China, premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight. His films combine unusual structures and bold imagery with humor, mystery and close attention to human behavior. They explore territories that are at once distant and strangely close.
