Wri/Dir: Katharina Rivilis | Cast: Naomi Costa, Logan Sage, Bianca Dumais, David Flores, Rebecca Schulz | Drama 2026
This Cannes Critics’ Week entry plays like a warped transatlantic fever dream, blending the darkly comic provocations of Ulrich Seidl with the uncanny textures of an American “weird wave” touched by a distinctly Lynchian sense of unease.
Set during the late summer of 2011, just as the aftershocks of catastrophe still reverberate globally, the film follows Franny, a teenager from Brandenburg, who arrives in New Mexico for what initially seems like a straightforward cultural exchange. Instead, what unfolds is a quietly disorienting portrait of youth adrift in a hyper-ideological, overstimulated world.
From the outset, this first feature for writer director Katharine Rivilis establishes its thematic preoccupations with striking bluntness: “America as the world’s policeman,” (a concept initiated by F D Roosevelt) is a culture saturated with junk food, attention deficits, and a creeping loss of discipline. Yet rather than sermonising, it filters these ideas through the fragmented experiences of its teenage ensemble. Franny (played by Naomi Costa in a striking debut) and her peers—each harbouring vague aspirations and unformed identities—drift between school, church, and desert gatherings, absorbing contradictory messages about freedom, obedience, and belonging.
The school environment is particularly telling. Archival footage of the collapsing Twin Towers and even Nagasaki is shown with an almost casual didacticism, still potent enough to unsettle but now embedded in a curriculum that feels both distant and invasive. The students themselves appear only half-engaged, their attention fractured, their conversations veering into conspiracy theories and half-understood global anxieties.
Visually, the film is consistently inventive. Vibrant colours, extreme close-ups, and off-kilter camera angles lend even mundane interactions an uneasy intensity. The film’s vibrant aesthetic and skilled camerawork of DoP Giulia Schelhas heighten the sense that we are seeing the world as these teenagers do: fragmented, overstimulating, and slightly unreal. A moonstone-tinted nighttime sequence in the desert is especially enthralling—both beautiful and alien, it encapsulates the film’s ability to find poetry in dislocation.
Franny’s living situation provides some of the film’s most unsettling moments. Sharing a room with a red-haired girl who insists on sleeping with the light on, she gradually uncovers signs of deeper trauma. The girl’s erratic behaviour—eventually linked to abuse—culminates in a disturbing roadside encounter where she nearly gets abducted after Franny and another girl approach a trucker for a drink of water. It’s a scene that captures the precariousness of their sheltered upbringing colliding with a more dangerous reality.
That sheltered environment is defined by rigid rules: no swearing, minimal contact with boys, and an emphasis on moral discipline. Yet these constraints coexist with surreal contradictions. By day, the teens attend evangelical church services where they are asked to pledge allegiance to the United States and practise rifle handling. By night, they attend a neon-infused rock concert in the desert, a hallucinatory release valve that feels both liberating and ominous.
Franny’s tentative connection with Elliott—an enigmatic local who rejects conventional structures—adds another layer. He is both alluring and troubling: a drug user who has never left his hometown, yet someone who seems acutely aware of the system’s limitations. Their interactions hint at the possibility of escape, but also at the difficulty of truly breaking free.
Ultimately, this late summer idyll will draw to a natural close, and film avoids any surprising revelations. Its portrayal of youth is neither wholly critical nor sympathetic, but deeply ambivalent. These teenagers are shaped by forces they barely understand—media saturation, ideological conditioning, and emotional neglect—yet they remain searching, curious, and intermittently alive to beauty.
I’ll Be Gone by June is strange, visually bold, and often elusive, but its cumulative effect is haunting: a portrait of a generation caught between indoctrination and inertia, trying to make sense of a world that feels increasingly incoherent.
WORLD PREMIERE | May 17 2026 | Cannes Film Festival