This is a deeply personal artistic statement framed as healing cinema — de Givry transforms his darkest childhood trauma into something luminous, moving from heavy autobiographical material toward brightness and hope. The director positions the film as a love letter to classic filmmaking aesthetics.
The real story here is how de Givry's candid admission that he was bullied for three to four years during his formative years gives this project an unmistakable raw edge. He's not interested in sanitized Hollywood bullying tropes — he's exposing the code of silence that makes bystanders complicit.
The film world premieres Wednesday, May 20 as the closing feature of Critics' Week at Cannes' 65th edition. De Givry confirmed to THR he was bullied for three to four years during childhood and teenage years, calling it 'pretty intense.' The plot centers on Otto Vidal, 14, who disappears after writing a farewell letter to classmates.
This is the kind of unflinching personal cinema that gets attention at Cannes — de Givry isn't playing it safe with his debut, and having Milo Machado-Graner from 'Anatomy of a Fall' attached guarantees eyeballs. Watch for this one when distribution deals get announced.
Félix de Givry is bringing his darkest memories to the biggest stage in independent cinema, and he's not pulling any punches about why. The French actor, best known for starring in Mia Hansen-Løve's Eden and as an Oscar-nominated producer behind Arco, makes his directorial debut with Goodbye Cruel World — serving as closing film for Critics' Week at the 65th Cannes Film Festival. The movie centers on Otto Vidal, a 14-year-old who disappears after writing a farewell letter to his classmates, with rumors swirling that he attempted suicide before Léna spots him roaming the city streets one night. In an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, de Givry got remarkably candid about the project's origins. "The starting point was my personal experiences that I went through during my childhood and teenage years," he revealed. "When we were writing the script, the idea was to start with these heavier autobiographical and personal topics and put fiction inside it, and even magic at some points." But here's where things get interesting — when asked directly if he was bullied as a kid, de Givry didn't hedge: "Yes, for three, four years, it was pretty intense." What makes his approach stand out from typical school-bullying narratives is his focus on what he calls "the omertà around bullying" — the code of silence that surrounds the trauma. "In cinema, there's been a lot of bullying, and typically you see a kid's head put in the toilet, or other images that for me are pretty false," de Givry explained to THR. "Of course, the violence aspect of bullying is very important, but it's also about the language and the fact that people don't talk about it... Actually, the worst thing about bullying is not so much the guy who bullies, but all the people around him who don't want to get bullied, so they don't say anything and are kind of accomplices." Co-star Milo Machado-Graner — fresh off his breakout in Justine Triet's Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall — weighed in on why this subject hits differently for French audiences. "In France, it's a really important subject," he said. "Since my childhood, there have always been prevention campaigns about that at school, and politicians are saying they are going to stop it. But I'm not sure things have really changed." Machado-Graner admitted he wasn't personally victimized but knows people who were — and emphasized that France is grappling with the issue in ways that haven't produced real solutions. The film also marks a deliberate throwback aesthetic choice, drawing inspiration from Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer. De Givry wanted to "really start from a place of darkness, and then light and the sun come in" — mirroring his own journey from trauma toward something brighter. The director even brought back old-school film music conventions, where thematic melodies return throughout the narrative rather than simply scoring emotional beats moment-to-moment. "Films today have forgotten this relationship with music," he noted. "I loved about film music from the '60s, and even the '30s, was that it was more the program of the film." Goodbye Cruel World premieres May 20 as Critics' Week's closing attraction — a position that traditionally signals festival favor for its selection committee. With Machado-Graner's star rising post-Anatomy of a Fall and de Givry's willingness to go there with his own story, this one could generate the kind of buzz that launches careers. Playtime is handling international sales, so expect distribution news to follow shortly after the premiere.
