Maurice Pialat was already in his early forties when he made his epochal debut, L’enfance nue (Naked Childhood), a devastating portrait of 10-year-old François, a troubled foster child passed from home to home in Lens. Played by Michel Terrazon with a riveting mix of volatility and vulnerability, François becomes one of the foundational figures of Pialat’s cinema: a child at once combative, withdrawn, and aching for connection. Working with largely nonprofessional performers and real environments, Pialat strips the “lost child” narrative of sentimentality, favoring abrupt ellipses, behavioral detail, and emotional understatement. The result is neither social case study nor melodrama, but something rawer and more unsettling. As he would throughout his career—including in his expansive follow-up La maison des bois—Pialat locates drama not in plot mechanics but in the fragile, often painful negotiations between youth and the adult world. An NYFF6 selection. A Janus Films release.