Gabin is a boy from a working-class family in rural northern France, torn between his love for his family and his longing for freedom, between the responsibilities of the present and his anxiety about the future. Gabin’s father wants his son to take over the family’s butcher shop, while Gabin is still too young to help his mother, who labors on the farm every day. Filmed over ten years, following the boy from age eight to eighteen, director Maxence Voiseux’s documentary marvelously etches the very materiality of time onto the screen. His gaze, staying close to his subject’s life as he watches one person’s growth and change, is both steady and tender, and the unembellished life set against pastoral landscapes lends the film a lyrical wistfulness. Time, flowing quietly and without fanfare, naturally builds a deep narrative, and encountering one person’s emotional and physical growth within the film’s compressed span of time is a genuinely wondrous experience. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood will naturally come to mind as well.
Born in the Ardennes, France in 1988. He studied documentary directing and editing at Paris VII University. His graduation film Of Men and Beasts (2014), about livestock farmers, first explored the theme of intergenerational inheritance and succession, and through this connection he went on to direct The Heirs (2015), the story of a butcher named Dominique and his brothers. He has since steadily made medium- and short-form documentaries including The Last Socialist (2017), The Crack (2019), and She Is One of Us (2021), working in both directing and editing. His first feature documentary, Gabin, follows Gabin, a boy raised between his butcher father Dominique and livestock-farmer mother Patricia, over the course of ten years starting when he was eight. It had its premiere at the Directors′ Fortnight of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
From Busan International Film Festival 2026, No. 31
