"La Gradiva" director Marin Atlan is the new lead voice behind the biggest teen drama since "Kids."

Puberty and shattered innocence collide in this fall's Cannes Critics' Week winner from Special 1-2. Writer/director/cinematographer Marin Atlan navigates high school drama in Pompeii via street acting at IndieWire.

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The raw heartache of the final days of high school, with all their promise and turmoil, becomes the setting for La Gradiva's deep and meticulous ethnographic exploration of teenage emotions.

Written, directed and filmed by Marine Atlant, the French-language coming-of-age story takes place in and around Naples and Pompeii on a class trip that proves to be profoundly life-changing for everyone – and with an incredible cast of actors who first found her literally on the street, everyone is encouraged to bring their own perspective to the material. The film won Atlan's directorial debut at Cannes Critics' Week, where indie outfit 1-2 Special picked it up for a winter release stateside. RELATED FESTIVAL FILM STORIES SO FAR: Venice Orizonti winner 'A Day in the Life of Joe: The Phaedra Season' lands at 1-2 Special 'La Bola Negra': Netflix's gay epic must survive its directors' meltdown before it can become an Oscar frontrunner.

Launching in 2025, 1-2 Special also held court at the New York Film Festival (NYFF) with Germany's Oscar-winning film "Everytime" and earlier this week bought the Venice and NYFF award-winning "A Day in the Life of Joe: The Phaedra Season." The films form a trilogy, emotional studies of adolescence shaped by grief. While "Everytime" goes to previews in November ahead of a wider release, "La Gradiva" will be in theaters for the first time, opening on December 18. For cinephiles, these were some of the buzziest discoveries at NYFF.

France ultimately chose the Russian-language (and partially French-produced) Minotaur to represent the Oscars for Best International Feature Film, but La Gradiva ranks high as one of the year's most acclaimed films. Especially after the wonderful play in Toronto and New York. Atlan, in his mid-30s, has long worked as a cinematographer and is working his way up to his directorial debut—and he heralds a multi-layered talent that will surely graduate to the next level at Cannes with his next film. Critics' Week has historically helped renowned filmmakers such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Andrea Arnold, Leos Carax, Julia Ducournau, Alejandro González Iñárritu, David Robert Mitchell, Justin Tritt, Francois Ozon and Gaspar Noet to compete on the international stage. Atlan's arrival reflects a discovery on their level.

A real-life drama whose dialogues and scenarios are derived from Atlan's screenplay, co-written by Anne Broille and improvised by the actors during rehearsals, La Gradiva opens both a window into teenage desire and something much larger and broader. The story follows a group of French teenagers who travel to Naples and are guided by their prolific teacher, Mercier (Antonia Buresi), who wants to show her students another slice of the world before they enter adulthood.

There's the animated, haunted, sharp-eyed Tony (Kolas Coignard), who takes the journey to explore his own sexuality—especially with one of the subtly directed Grinders—even as he's in love with his best friend, the charismatic James (Mithia Kaplie Adat). We first meet James, the most politically active person ever, as he glowers having sex (perhaps for the first time?) with a female classmate on a train while Tony watches. This voyeuristic moment sets the stage for painful revelations as La Gradiva gradually tears apart the cracks of a friendship.

Meanwhile, bookish, introverted aspiring artist Susan (Susan Greene) finds herself, in her own words, "undeniable," but will have a sensual awakening—and more—of her own. They immerse themselves in art history and archaeology, and in Tony's own tense family history tied to the site, they discover the ruins of Pompeii and the desiccated corpses beneath the ashes of centuries ago. All actors are what you call "unprofessional". But nothing seems unprofessional about their deeply internalized performances, as they imbue "La Gradiva" with the air of documentary drama. "I wasn't against using actresses and professional actors, even for the youth of the film," Atlan said, "but it was very important to me that the actors and actresses be the same age as the characters." IndieWire spoke about the film's two-year audition process during a recent IndieWire interview, via translator Nicholas Elliott.

"It's relatively rare to find professionals at that young age," he said. We saw some people who had already acted, did acting sessions. "What was really important to me was to have this sense of realism, something familiar, so that when people see this film, they can reconfigure the faces that maybe they knew from their classes at school." "Having unknown faces helps the production. So what happened is my casting director, Julie Sokolowski, and I did what we actually call street acting."

This meant standing outside schools as children left for the day, watching amateur theater groups and attending political demonstrations in Paris. That's how they discovered Mitya Kaplie Udat, who had participated in the city's annual May Day anarchist demonstration.

"We spent at least six months in the audition process with her, because in her case, it was really changing the character significantly, really going into something quite gender fluid," Atlan says. "I wanted a bit of androgyny about that character, but Mitya is really feminine. So for that character, it was a really big change."

The actor is also "very political in his life," so Atlan's production had to respond, including in a pivotal scene where the students discuss their generation. The political stances of some of the film's situations came after rehearsals. "When I saw Mitya make his arguments, when I saw him present his opinions, when I saw that he had a dialectical relationship with politics, I thought it was a very interesting thing to have this character in that scene."

Elsewhere, Atlan said, "According to Colas, he was a dancer for 10 years." So when I was directing him as an actor, I was really working on his relationship with the body. Sozan's kind of rebellious temper made that character transparent. So I can say that the characters of the actors strengthened and deepened the interpretation or the portrayal of the characters.

"La Gradiva" was tough on the first-time cast because of the emotional on-screen presence, and Atlan and his team had to adjust the level of intimacy required with their collaboration.

"I wanted the movie to be about desire, which was the main theme of the movie, but it was more important to find the right actors and actresses to play the characters. So when we got our three main actors, we had an intimacy coordinator and we created a situation where we worked with them to get them to a point where they were comfortable touching each other and so on," he said. They also gave me a formal document listing what they wanted to do and what they didn't want to do. So to be very precise, Colas didn't want to kiss anyone. That meant in some cases I had to rewrite things.”

But this reconfiguration also affected the way Atlan scenes were filmed. "When Tony meets an Italian guy on Grindr, there's a lot going on off-screen and off-screen... I always thought these were 17-year-olds and it was unthinkable to make them do something they didn't want to do."

After all, he wasn't making a Larry Clark movie ("We can't do that," Atlan laughed). But until then, "La Gradiva" looks to be the most engaging teen drama since 1995's drug- and sex-fueled New Yorker "The Kids," which reinvented the genre for the indie film and featured a new cast of young actors.

"La Gradiva" will open from 1-2 state special from December 18.