Prince, A

Prince, A

In the blissful yet forbidding French countryside, an enveloping, cross-generational saga unfolds among a young gardening apprentice and the three men training him, all of whom become instrumental in his professional tutelage as well as his sexual coming-of-age. Under the austere eye of filmmaker and farmer Pierre Creton, shooting in the pastoral environs of his home village in Normandy, A Prince is a striking, anti-realist drama that balances the classical and the absurd, told almost entirely through overlapping voiceover narration. Moving away from the docudrama of his previous work, Creton creates something entirely new and strange - a singular vision of a quietly eroticized natural world. Winner of the prize for best French-language film in the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.