EXCLUSIVE: Gabin, set to premiere Thursday in Cannes, tells a classic coming of age story, a boy growing up in Northern France who must choose whether to follow a path prescribed by his family or strike out on his own.

The documentary directed by Maxence Voiseux bows in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar, alongside fictional titles including Butterfly Jam, Atonement, and Clarissa. We have your first look at Voiseux’s film in the trailer above.

Gabin, shot over a period of 10 years, follows Gabin Jourdel from boyhood through adolescence. He’s the youngest of the Jourdel children and, as a lover of animals, perhaps not well disposed to become a butcher like his father.

“Torn between family loyalty and a desire to break free, his dreams lie elsewhere,” notes a synopsis, “to train a contest cow, to become a dog breeder, and to save his mother’s farm from financial ruin.”

The filmmaker hails from the same region of Artois as his protagonist, a place he describes as “a forgotten land, its landscapes often washed in a pale and unsettling light.” Voiseux writes in a director’s statement, “My relationship with this region has always been complex. As a child, I saw it as bleak and austere. Only much later did I begin to see it as a genuine film set, its inhabitants as living, novelistic characters.”

Voiseux originally got to know the Jourdel family in 2014 while working on his short film Des hommes et des bêtes (Of Men and Beasts). He later made a mid-length documentary about Gabin’s father and siblings called Les Héritiers (The Heirs), before deciding to dedicate a feature length film to Gabin’s progress toward adulthood.

“The film takes place between his 8th and 18th birthdays, but I had shot the first sequences during The Heirs,” Voiseux explained in an interview with journalist Manon Marcillat. “So, when we started filming Gabin, he was eleven years old. The film was never conceived as an immersion; I always approached it knowing there would be ellipses because I wanted Gabin to be able to grow up ‘outside’ the film. I went there three to six times a year and filmed for a solid week. If you set aside the break I had to take because of Covid, we shot for about a hundred days in total.”

There’s a subtlety to the director’s approach, one he describes as “narrative, non-explanatory cinema.” He added in his interview with Marcillat, “You have to find the balance to give the viewer enough elements to understand what is at stake, without over-emphasizing things. And that can come down to a word, a look, a shot.”

Gabin is written and directed by Maxence Voiseux, and produced by Cécile Lestrade and Elise Hug. Cinematography is by François Chambe and Martin Roux. Pascale Hannoyer and Natali Barrey edited the film. The music is composed by Nicolas Rabaeus.

Watch the trailer for Gabin above.