French documentary filmmaker Maxence Voiseux clearly has patience, stamina and the desire to immerse audiences in a world that they are likely not familiar with. For his feature debut, Gabin, he filmed a young man for a decade, following him and his feelings of being caught between continuing his family’s farm life, as envisioned by his father, and the slowly developing desire to follow his own dreams from age 8 until age 18. The documentary world premieres in the Directors’ Fortnight lineup of Cannes 2026 on Thursday, May 14.
Gabin is the youngest child of the Jourdel family in a rural part of Artois, a region in the north of France, “where leaving feels like betrayal, and staying comes at a cost,” as press notes highlight. Destined to take over his father’s butcher shop, he feels torn between family loyalty, the desire to save the farm from financial ruin and dreams to break free.
Gabin unfolds in a neglected countryside far away from the world’s eyes and hit by globalization. “I turn my camera towards what remains of that heritage: men who have rarely been rewarded by life,” Voiseux explains in a director’s statement. “As a child, I saw [Artois] as bleak and austere. Only much later did I begin to see it as a genuine film set, its inhabitants as living, novelistic characters. The Artois region is where I first envisioned becoming a filmmaker, and I pay particular attention to its working-class roots.”
In 2014, for his graduation film, Of Men and Beasts, Voiseux actually made a short about the livestock market in Arras, Artois, where he met Gabin’s grandfather. He then met his three sons, with whom he shot The Heirs, his first mid-length doc.
Gabin, written and directed by Voiseux, with cinematography by François Chambe and Martin Roux and editing by Pascale Hannoyer and Natali Barrey. Produced by Cécile Lestrade and Elise Hug of Alter Ego Production, co-produced by Ulla Lehmann of Ama Film and Palmyre Badinier of Rita Productions, in co-production with SWR/ARTE and RTS Radio Télévision Suisse. The French distributor for Gabin is Arizona Distribution. Lightdox is handling sales.
Ahead of the doc’s premiere in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, THR wanted to know from the filmmaker about the challenges and joys of shooting a doc over the course of a decade.
Voiseux says that he spent around 100-115 days shooting. “But actually, the most important thing was the time I spent with Gabin,” he tells THR. “Some of those exchanges you can maybe feel in the movie, but you won’t see them. I spent so much time between the shooting sessions preparing and talking to them.”
On every visit, the filmmaker said he felt like a cousin of the family, with Gabin even introducing him as his cousin at times to simplify interactions with other people. “But at the same time, I was also a filmmaker, and they knew it,” Voiseux highlights. “So they knew after a while that I was thinking about what they were sharing with me and how I could put it in the movie or not. And I would ask them for their thoughts.”
By the time the filming was done, “Gabin had spent more time being shot by me than not shooting with me,” points out the director. “So, it was a crazy journey for me, but also for him. And the movie is part of life for him and for me.”
At times, the film created a space for intimate conversations, including about Gabin’s future. At times, it was stressful for all involved, but they remained committed to making the doc.
Voiseux acknowledges, though, that sometimes it became difficult to tell where life and film blurred together or one influenced the other. “They used the film as a process, or as a molecule, to make their life a bit better and to make things happen,” he tells THR. “Sometimes I, or we, didn’t even know if they were doing things for themselves, for the movie, for everyone or all [of those]. So, sometimes it’s a huge mix of life and film.”
After years of treating and describing each other as cousins. At some point, Gabin visited Voiseux in Paris, opening his life to the young man in a way he hadn’t done before. “That was when we really went from cousins to becoming brothers,” shares the director.
How is their relationship now that the film is completed? “It is a bit strange,” he says. “Now, it is just him and me, without the camera, without the process of cinema. So, now we don’t talk about cinema. We talk only about life.”
Voiseux showed Gabin the film before sending the final version to Cannes. “I went to Canada to screen it for him because I wanted to be sure that it’s okay for him in terms of integrity. We rented a small cinema and watched the movie together. It was so moving. And at the end of the movie, Gabin was crying.”
And to the filmmaker’s delight, Gabin felt seen, heard and accurately presented. “He told me immediately that the movie was precise and so close to his heart,” Voiseux recalls.
All that was just possible because of the “huge trust” between filmmaker and the people he filmed for so long and Voiseux’s “focus on the desire of my characters,” he emphasizes.
The filmmaker is a big believer that the more local and specific a story is, the more universal it is. He hopes that audiences around the world will feel that Gabin’s loyalty to his family and region, as well as his dreams of breaking out of a fate decided by others speaks to them. Concludes Voiseux: “Gabin is about a young man driven by his spirit of emancipation and strong fidelity to the Artois region. And that is a pretty strong story.”
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