From South Los Angeles and New York's margins to motherhood and pop stardom, four films offered a revealing look at American cinema in 2026.
Monday, September 7, at the 52nd Deauville American Film Festival offered a particularly revealing cross-section of the event's 2026 identity. At the C.I.D., four films followed one another from morning to evening: two Competition titles, a Premiere, and a Star Screening. The sequence moved from working-class South Los Angeles to New York's digital margins, then into an intimate drama inspired by Virginia Woolf before ending with an A24 production built around celebrity, friendship, and artistic reinvention. It was less a conventional themed program than a compact panorama of how contemporary American filmmakers are using familiar subjects, including family, identity, motherhood, performance, and loneliness, to pursue highly personal forms.
The day began with If I Go Will They Miss Me, presented in Competition in a 92-minute version. Written and directed by Walter Thompson-Hernández, the film follows twelve-year-old Lil Ant, who imagines his working-class neighborhood beneath the LAX flight path as a living mythology while trying to connect with a father he idolizes despite their difficult relationship. The cast highlighted by the festival includes Danielle Brooks and J. Alphonse Nicholson, while cinematography is credited to Michael Fernandez, music to Malcolm Parson, and editing to Walter Thompson-Hernández and Daysha Broadway.
The feature expands the filmmaker's award-winning 2022 short of the same name and premiered in Sundance's NEXT section in January 2026. Sundance described the project as an exploration of fractured fatherhood through a poetic lens, while the film's reception there repeatedly emphasized its combination of social observation and magical realism. That context made the Deauville screening especially interesting: this was the film's French premiere, placing a work born from a very specific Los Angeles environment before a Normandy festival audience. Walter Thompson-Hernández attended the C.I.D. screening and took part in the post-film discussion, giving spectators a direct bridge between the film's mythic imagery and the lived emotional territory behind it.
In the afternoon, the Competition continued with the French premiere of Here I'm Alive, an 81-minute drama directed by Joshua Z. Weinstein. Set over a single night in New York City, the film follows migrants, sex workers, dreamers, and survivors moving through the city's digital underbelly in search of connection while remaining pushed toward its margins. Deauville credits Joshua Z. Weinstein and Brian Perkins with the screenplay, with Weinstein also serving as cinematographer and editor; the music is by Eben D'Amico. The principal cast includes Cheyenne Gallagher, Eddie Torrenegra, Caleb Zuzga, Krystaly Figueroa, and Emira D'Spain.
The screening was followed by a meeting with the film team, with Joshua Z. Weinstein, Brian Perkins, and producer Daniel Finkelman taking part in the Q&A. FlickDirect also scheduled a separate interview with Weinstein later that afternoon at Hôtel Barrière Le Royal, creating a more intimate conversation between the public screening and the late-afternoon program. The timing gave this second film of the day an unusual rhythm: first a collective encounter at the C.I.D., then a quieter opportunity to discuss a project whose very subject is the difficulty of making genuine human connections.
Later in the day, the program shifted from Competition to the Premieres section with The Last Day, the 99-minute feature written and directed by Rachel Rose, who was present to introduce the screening. The drama stars Alicia Vikander, Victoria Pedretti, and Wagner Moura and unfolds over a single summer day in New York. Its central figure, Julia, is a writer and mother struggling with creative stagnation, grief, and her daughter's approaching adolescence. Her path intersects with Taylor, a labor-and-delivery nurse facing a postpartum crisis, creating a story about two mothers whose lives briefly touch at moments of profound uncertainty.
The film is explicitly inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, a connection that gives its one-day structure more than a formal purpose: ordinary movement through the city becomes a way to expose private anxieties, memory, and questions of identity. The Last Day had already surfaced at the 2026 Tribeca Festival, where discussion centered on the parallel pressures carried by its two mothers. At Deauville, Rachel Rose's presence made the late-afternoon screening a notable transition in the day, away from the younger male perspectives and urban subcultures of the first two films and toward a female-centered examination of creativity, care, and selfhood.
The evening Star Screening was Mother Mary, written and directed by David Lowery and presented at the C.I.D. in Dolby Atmos. No cast or filmmaker appearance was announced for the Deauville screening, leaving the film itself as the evening's sole focus. The 112-minute A24 production stars Anne Hathaway as pop icon Mother Mary and Michaela Coel as Sam Anselm, her estranged former costume designer and longtime friend. On the eve of the singer's comeback performance, their reunion forces old wounds back to the surface. The ensemble also includes Hunter Schafer, Atheena Frizzell, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Alba Baptista, Isaura Barbé-Brown, Sian Clifford, and FKA Twigs.
That premise made Mother Mary an apt closing film for a day preoccupied with people trying to reconnect with fathers, strangers, creative identities, old friends, or versions of themselves. A24's conversation with David Lowery and Anne Hathaway emphasized the intense collaboration behind the film, including Hathaway's extensive preparation and Lowery's interest in performance and transformation. Seen after three smaller-scale dramas, its heightened pop-world setting offered a change of register without abandoning the emotional thread running through the C.I.D. program.
Taken together, the four screenings made September 7 one of those festival days in which programming creates unexpected dialogue between films. If I Go Will They Miss Me uses childhood imagination to negotiate a damaged father-son bond; Here I'm Alive searches for contact among people navigating New York's margins; The Last Day examines motherhood, artistic paralysis, and the possibility of reclaiming a self; Mother Mary turns a long-broken friendship into the pressure point for a major public comeback. The scales differ radically, but each film asks what remains when a person's idea of themselves collides with the people around them.
For Deauville, the day also illustrated the festival's ability to place emerging and established voices in immediate proximity. Walter Thompson-Hernández and Joshua Z. Weinstein arrived with Competition titles and direct audience encounters, Rachel Rose accompanied her Premiere, and David Lowery's star-driven A24 film supplied the evening event. From the morning's first screening through the evening presentation, the C.I.D. became a concentrated route through four very different versions of American cinema in 2026.
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