The 51st edition of the Deauville American Film Festival from 5 to 14 September has 13 films in competition, including 10 by debut directors. And there will be plenty of premieres and stars on the Normandy boardwalks.
Although there are lots of first-time feature-film directors, several of them are very familiar with the world of cinema. Actors Scarlett Johansson and Kristen Stewart certainly know their way around a film set. They have chosen to tell stories focused on female protagonists at either end of the journey of life
Johansson’s début Eleanor the Great follows the 94-year-old Eleanor from retirement in Florida back to her home city NYC after a loss.
Stewart adapted an autobiographical tale of the difficult upbringing of a competitive swimmer in The Chronology of Water. Both films were chosen for Un certain regard at this year’s Cannes film festival.
Joshua Oppenheimer is an experienced documentary filmmaker. In The End he has created a science-fiction musical about a family living in a luxury bunker years after an environmental disaster. A young woman arrives from the outside world, upsetting their equilibrium.
Two actors are in multiple films in the competition and premières at the festival.
Australian actor and director Joel Edgerton will be receiving a Deauville Talent Award for roles in films like Loving and The Underground Railroad, and those he has directed such as Boy Erased. He also features in a film in competition and another premiering at the festival. The former is The Plague by Charlie Polinger, set in a boys’ water-polo camp where a 12-year-old is targeted for bullying. In Train Dreams by Clint Bentley, he plays Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker in the rapidly changing America of the early 20th Century.
British actor Josh O’Connor, meanwhile, is in no less than three films in the festival. The actor seen in the TV series The Durrells and the biopic about Lee Miller, Lee, is in the premieres of The History of Sound by Olivier Hermanus and The Mastermind by Kelly Reichardt, a Deauville favourite. His roles range over a century, with History of Sound set around WWI. O’Connor stars with Irish actor Paul Mescal (Gladiator II, Normal People) as two young musicians in Boston who set off to collect American folk songs.
He stays in New England but jumps to the 1970s for The Mastermind, playing an unemployed carpenter tries to become an art thief, with disastrous consequences.
In competition, he plays a modern-day rancher burned out of his Colorado home by a wildfire in Rebuilding, a first film by Max Walker Silvermann. The director filmed in the area he grew up in and know intimately.
Both Rebuilding and another first film, East of Wall by Kate Beecroft give a view of the American West today (the latter has been renamed The New West for its French release). They would make a great addition to Shine Brighter 2e ShortFile 2 Cowboys ride back.
Beecroft’s film is also set on a ranch, in South Dakota, where the protagonist Tabatha tries to help a group of teenagers through teaching them about horses and training them for rodeo.
American actor Zoey Deutch, recently seen in Juror #2, will be receiving Deauville’s Nouvel Hollywood award, which seems particularly appropriate as she will be at the festival for the première of Nouvelle Vague. She plays Jean Seberg in Richard Linklater’s homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
Finally, in the American docs section of the festival, one documentary particularly caught our eye. The brilliant Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro, Ernest Cole Lost and Found) has been delving into the final months of George Orwell’s life, as he finished 1984 for Orwell 2+2 = 5.
Release dates for those that have been announced:
Eleanor The Great 19 Nov 2025
The Chronology of Water 15 Oct 2025
Train Dreams 21 Nov 2025 Netflix
The History of Sound 25 Feb 2026
Rebuilding 17 Dec 2025
East Of Wall 29 April 2026
Nouvelle Vague 8 Oct 2025
Orwell 2+2 = 5 25 Feb 2026
Deauville American Film Festival
5 to 14 September 2025
Tag(s) : "American cinema" "American West" "Cannes" "coming-of-age" "Deauville" "film festival" "Shine Brighter 2e"
