Forever Young

César Award winner for Best Female Newcomer (Nadia Tereszkiewicz)

Before he was internationally known as a filmmaker of modern classics like Queen Margot and Intimacy, the late Patrice Chéreau was a director at the famed French theater school Les Amandiers. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, a Rendez-Vous regular both as an actress and as a director, draws upon her own memories in this fond, often rowdy group portrait of a tight-knit class navigating their first year at the school. Under the tutelage of Chéreau (Louis Garrel, himself the accomplished director of Rendez-Vous 2023 selection The Innocent), the students grow both personally and professionally during the late 1980s, studying briefly at the Actors Studio in New York City before tackling a year-end production of Chekhov’s Platonov. Among them is Stella (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), whose love affair with a talented but unstable fellow student provides a through-line across Bruni Tedeschi’s chaotic and loving recollections.