Susan Sarandon's Icon Award capped a packed day at Deauville that also brought Casey Affleck's Company, Zach Woods' The Accompanist, and a restored Brady Corbet film to the festival.
Thursday, September 10, confirmed one of the particular strengths of the 52nd Deauville American Film Festival: its ability to place new American cinema, rediscoveries, and major screen personalities within the same day. At the C.I.D., the program moved from Guy Nattiv's competition drama The Liberation of Rita Cooper to Casey Affleck's new feature Company, then to a restored presentation of Brady Corbet's The Childhood of a Leader, before the evening turned into a celebration of Susan Sarandon.
Sarandon received the Deauville Icon Award ahead of the screening of The Accompanist, the feature directorial debut of Zach Woods. Earlier in the afternoon, she also inaugurated a beach cabin bearing her name on Deauville's famous Les Planches, adding her to the long line of artists permanently associated with the seaside festival.
The C.I.D. program began with The Liberation of Rita Cooper, a 120-minute competition title directed by Guy Nattiv. Set in 1980s New Jersey, the film follows Rita, a woman worn down by an exhausting daily life and a traumatic past who finds apparent peace after meeting Ricky, the charismatic leader of a community of women. As Rita is gradually drawn into the group's cult-like beliefs, the intervention of her two daughters forces her to confront the cost of the freedom she believes she has found.
Carrie Coon leads a cast that also includes Lily James, Bella Ramsey, Odessa Young, and Tracey Letts. The film is especially personal for Nattiv: the festival notes that the story was inspired by the life of his grandmother. The filmmaker, whose short Skin won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film and whose feature Skin competed at Deauville in 2019, therefore returned to Normandy with a work in which intimate memory and the mechanics of manipulation intersect.
The Liberation of Rita Cooper is one of the thirteen features selected for Deauville's 2026 competition and was presented as a French premiere.
In the afternoon, Casey Affleck presented Company in competition, with Caylee Cowan also attending and a meeting with the film team following the screening. Running 95 minutes, the film is Affleck's third feature as a director after I'm Still Here and Light of My Life.
Co-written with Ron Hansen, Company begins on a winter night as a mysterious traveler tells a story spanning generations and connecting wounded lives caught between vengeance and forgiveness. The cast brings together Nick Nolte, Ben Mendelsohn, Adelaide Clemens, Scoot McNairy, Emily Alyn Lind, and Caylee Cowan, alongside Affleck's sons Atticus Affleck and Indiana Affleck.
The project arrived in Deauville almost directly from the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered in competition on September 8. That proximity gave the Deauville screening the feeling of a genuine first encounter for French audiences. The film's unusually textured visual identity is reflected in its multiple credited cinematographers, while Nick Cave composed the music.
Affleck, an Academy Award winner for Manchester by the Sea, remains an actor at the center of American independent cinema, but Company again shows his interest as a filmmaker in grief, damaged families, and morally unsettled characters.
Later in the afternoon, the festival shifted from a brand-new competition film to a significant return from recent cinema history with The Childhood of a Leader. Brady Corbet's 2015 feature screened in a restored version in the Premieres section, in the presence of Bérénice Bejo.
Set in 1919, while the Treaty of Versailles is being negotiated, the film observes young Prescott as he grows up around the diplomatic circles attempting to shape the postwar world. His increasingly disturbing behavior gradually turns the family home into a political and psychological laboratory.
Bejo stars alongside Robert Pattinson, Liam Cunningham, Stacy Martin, and Tom Sweet. Written by Corbet with Mona Fastvold, photographed by Lol Crawley, and driven by Scott Walker's imposing score, the 115-minute film now carries additional resonance because Corbet's later work has made his fascination with power, ideology, and monumental ambition even more visible.
Its presence in Deauville also created a bridge between the festival's commitment to premieres and its desire to keep important films alive through restoration and renewed theatrical presentation.
The emotional center of the day came in the evening, when Susan Sarandon was honored with the Deauville Icon Award. The tribute celebrated a career that began with Joe in 1970 and grew through films as different as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Atlantic City, The Hunger, Bull Durham, Thelma & Louise, Lorenzo's Oil, The Client, and Dead Man Walking, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
The ceremony also carried a particularly meaningful connection with filmmaker Euzhan Palcy, who worked with Sarandon on the 1989 anti-apartheid drama A Dry White Season. Palcy, a member of the 2026 Deauville jury, made history with that film as the first Black woman to direct a feature for a major Hollywood studio, MGM, and received an Honorary Academy Award in 2022.
Their shared history gave the tribute an added sense of continuity: Deauville was not simply celebrating an accumulation of famous roles, but an actress whose career repeatedly crossed paths with filmmakers using cinema to engage with political, social, and moral questions.
The evening continued with The Accompanist, the 110-minute feature debut of Zach Woods, presented in his presence and starring Susan Sarandon as Sylvia. Co-written by Woods and Brandon Gardner, the film begins when nine-year-old Emily reveals that her grandfather, who has dementia, nearly got them killed. A child-welfare intervention leads to Emily being placed with Sylvia, an unconventional new foster parent whose warmth and unpredictability are complicated by visitations from her past.
Everly Carganilla plays Emily, while Aubrey Plaza appears as Sarah, the child-welfare agent. The cast also includes Ilia Volok, John Rothman, Helena Howard, and Kevyn Morrow.
Woods is widely known to American audiences for The Office and Silicon Valley, but The Accompanist marks his first feature behind the camera. Pairing Sarandon's career tribute with a new filmmaker's debut was a particularly fitting piece of programming: rather than freezing an icon in nostalgia, the festival connected her legacy to a new work and a new directing voice.
Sarandon's presence in The Accompanist allowed the evening to look backward and forward at the same time, connecting a career spanning more than five decades with another filmmaker taking his first step into feature directing.
Across four major C.I.D. presentations, September 10 moved through cult influence, gothic storytelling, the roots of authoritarianism, family bonds, memory, and artistic legacy. It also demonstrated the breadth of the 2026 edition, which runs from September 4 to 13 and presents 80 films across nine categories.
The day's progression was unusually coherent despite the very different works involved: The Liberation of Rita Cooper examined a woman searching for freedom inside a dangerous collective; Company explored wounded people caught between revenge and forgiveness; The Childhood of a Leader looked toward the formation of political violence; and The Accompanist placed care, memory, and haunting at the center of an intergenerational relationship.
Above all, Susan Sarandon gave the day its defining image. Her Deauville Icon Award recognized a career that has consistently moved between mainstream Hollywood, independent filmmaking, and socially engaged work, while The Accompanist ensured the celebration remained connected to what comes next. For a festival built around the continuing relationship between American cinema and French audiences, that combination of memory and discovery felt entirely appropriate.
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