Two limping souls in their sixties collide – literally – on a street corner. What begins as a clumsy accident becomes a quiet spark. Over coffee, they linger. They talk. And just like that, an unlikely intimacy begins to bloom. The Slug and the Snail traces the gentle unfurling of a connection born not of urgency, but of presence of two bodies long ignored by the tempo of the world, finding rhythm in each other. Anne Benhaïem’s film is a tender ode to queer aging, to liminality, to love that doesn't need to shout to be heard. With stripped-down direction and performances that pulse with lived-in truth, the film crafts a space of radical softness. It speaks to loneliness without pity, to affection without spectacle. It reminds us that desire doesn’t fade, it just changes shape. Benhaïem herself plays one half of the duo, bringing a raw, honest magnetism that makes the story feel lived rather than performed. This is cinema as whisper, as mirror, as gentle rebellion.

Farida runs a three-star hotel in Nîmes. For the past year, she has been receiving a singular clientele. Homeless people, migrants, women victims of violence, have found shelter there during the health crisis. Through successive confinements, the hotel has become a micro-society in which each person must learn to live with the other, whatever their history and difference. Between the interventions of social workers, mutual aid and waiting, an inventory of emergency accommodation is drawn up.

The late dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who died in 1989, resurrects in 2021 as a hologram to address the contemporary inhabitants of a small Romanian village. What happens next is captured in a hybrid documentary, observing the effects this unusual encounter has on the people involved, many of whom are first-hand witnesses of Ceaușescu’s rule.

A café terrace. Couples of teenagers are sitting here and there. They discuss things in life, but curiously with the experience of people much older than they seem. The watchful and caring waiter of the café responds to them in song, offering a touching and poetic filmed fantasy.

A portrait of the Larrieu brothers at work shot during the post-production of their film Tralala.

Upon hearing her beloved grandmother is dying, a young woman returns to rural Lithuania, where she must confront a past she’s tried to forget. Sharunas Bartas unflinchingly examines family fractures, capturing unspoken tensions and simmering resentments within a rural household isolated by geography and emotional distance.

An unexpected encounter completely changes Lila's perspective on her life as she waits for the results of a medical test. This is a semi-autobiographical story about accepting sadness and the transmission of emotional bonds between women.

On the Mexican Pacific coast, the land Ina Marija adopted before dying too young, her father and younger sister Una embark on a journey in her footsteps. There, amidst the lush nature of the mangroves—in a lagoon ravaged by hurricanes and constantly reborn—they begin the process of mourning. As he films this journey, Sharunas Bartas lays bare his emotions and, in an act of transmission, seeks a reconstruction nourished by the natural cycles of life and nature.

From 2016 to 2021, Laurent Achard directed four portraits of filmmakers: Vecchiali, Brisseau, Stévenin, and Mazuy. The fifth (Carax), begun in 2023 at the Villa Medici, remained unfinished. He nicknamed it “The Chairs.” “When we consider how familiar death is, and how complete our ignorance is, and that there has never beenany escape, we must admit that the secret is well kept!” (Jankelevitch)