Off-Courts Trouville: Celebrating Short Films and Emerging Filmmakers
Just two hours by train from Paris, the twin seaside towns of Deauville and Trouville come alive every early September with two major film festivals unfolding side by side: the Deauville American Film Festival, all red carpets and Hollywood glamour, and Off-Courts Trouville, the second most important short-film festival in France after Clermont-Ferrand and undoubtedly the cooler, more adventurous and vibrant of the two.
Founded in 2000, Off-Courts has become one of France’s most dynamic showcases for short filmmaking. With a strong industry focus and film market, it’s a crucial meeting point for filmmakers, producers and audiences from across the world. The festival is known not only for its competitions — which spotlight innovative shorts from France and Canada — but also for its emphasis on collaboration and exchange between both sides of the Atlantic, encouraging co-creation through its “Labos de création” — creative labs — where filmmakers, musicians, actors, set designers and visual artists develop projects on the spot. The atmosphere is both festive and experimental: screenings run alongside concerts, exhibitions and networking events, giving the festival the feel of a creative residency. Towards the end of the festival, two not-to-be-missed screenings, “Soirée Kino Kabaret” and “Soirée,” are the playful culmination of happy days spent making cinema together.
Film critics also enjoy a spotlight at the festival, with the Débat de la Critique — a lively panel in which three emerging critics debate the artistic merits of the competition shorts — preceding the Award Ceremony.
Through its smart strategy of attracting new talent, Off-Courts Trouville has established itself as a launchpad for emerging voices in cinema. Winning a prize here often signals the arrival of a filmmaker or producer to watch. Of all the competition shorts I watched — each of exceptionally high quality — a number of offbeat comedies stood out: “En Beauté” by Rémi Mardini, “Mort d’un acteur” by Ambroise Rateau, and the deliciously zany “Sam et Lola” by Mahaut Adam. In the parallel section Beaux Joueurs, one standout was “La Conquête” by Yannik Privat, featuring a predominantly female cast and produced by Ambre le Guilly of Lybre Production, who herself won a Young Producer Award.
My absolute favourite short film of the festival was “Rives” by Arthur Cahn, for its elegance, restraint and quiet force. It tells the story of two teenagers from a privileged background who, drifting helplessly on a buoy down a river in Normandy, encounter a brother and sister from a more modest milieu. What begins as a chance meeting on the water becomes a subtle yet piercing exploration of class divides, conveyed without spectacle yet with a disarming clarity. The film received the award for Best French Film, the highest accolade of the festival. Below is an interview with the filmmaker, who is already in preparation for his first feature film.
Dana Knight: Congratulations again on winning the Grand Prize at Off-Courts Trouville. Your short film Rives struck me as impeccable — both conceptually and technically. How many years of hard work experimenting with the short form brought you to this stage?
Arthur Cahn: “Rives” is my fifth short film produced. The first one was shot ten years ago already. I thought I had gone full circle with short films, but I always have new ideas and one day I shared one of them, which was “Rives,” with one of my closest friends. He loved this little story so much, he would talk to me about it almost every time we saw each other. Then I was made aware that there was a short film script competition in the area where the story I had in mind is located. I took it as a sign. One afternoon, I sat down at my computer to write the script and the director’s statement, then I sent the whole thing to the competition and it was selected as a finalist.
DK: I haven’t seen your earlier shorts, do they share the same elegance and subtlety, or were they stylistically different? Could you take us briefly through your filmmaking journey up to “Rives”?
AC: “Rives” is quite coherent within my humble filmography, while being, like every film, a unique act with its own specificities.Something that comes up a lot when people come to tell me about my shorts is the word “douceur,” which can be translated as gentleness or softness. I had shot four films before this one, plus my graduation film from La Fémis. “Rives” is my most family-friendly film, I would say, no sex, no death or taboo subjects. It’s the only one I could share with my family on the living room TV at Christmas.
In the way it is shot, “Rives” is in line with the previous films though: I have a very precise shot list before shooting. I already know 80% of the shots I want, and I often place the actors within the frame; it is the frame that creates the space and the choreography of the actors. This was the case in my previous films, except for “Totems” which I shot two or three years earlier, and was a very handheld camera film where the actors’ movements dictated the camera, and not the other way around.
DK: “Rives” feels elegant, restrained, yet also piercing in its commentary on class divides. How did the core idea for the film emerge?
AC: The idea was inspired by the landscape we filmed in: my parents have a house by the river with a pontoon and I have celebrated my birthday there with my friends in this completely idyllic setting, champagne glass in hand. A privileged setting. And we would joke that we would put the unicorn buoy on the river with a rope to take photos. It’s a very graphic idea. And my mind started to drift, I imagined the rope breaking and this buoy being carried away by the current. Where is it going? What does this story want to tell? I followed the buoy and was a witness of the story.
I am very sensitive to questions of belonging to social classes which comes from the fact that my mum and dad come from very different backgrounds. So I grew up with a view on two different worlds. On my father’s side it’s a bourgeois Parisian family. On my mother’s side it’s a middle-class, or even lower-class, rural family. It came to me that we are terribly subjected to our environment when we are young, we adopt its perspective, its values, and it is only as we grow up that we can take a step back and get out of it, at least a little, and assert ourselves as individuals with our own ideas and values.
DK: Narratively speaking, you avoid the usual dramatic devices of tension building and instead craft something more subdued. The final scene is painful to watch, almost cringe-worthy, although completely devoid of drama. Was this approach present from the outset?
AC: If my memory is right, the story imposed itself on me once and for all, with its beginning and its end. There has always been this little bit of cruelty. I identify it as an influence from the short stories of Maupassant that I read as a young adult. Especially “The Necklace,” which has a very harsh ending, almost a punchline like a joke, but a cruel joke.
DK: How did you shape the form of the film? Were there many versions of the script?
AC: No, there were not many versions of the script. Maybe because the story had been gestating in me for a long time before I started to write it. It was ready. When the script became a finalist in this script competition I mentioned, I was offered a week-long writing residency at the Moulin d’Andé, which is a very beautiful place where I met wonderful people, but we were asked every day to come up with a new, improved version of the script, while I did not see what more or better I could say . . . I had to invent scenes that I finally removed once the residency was over . . . It only made the film longer, and a short film is better when it’s short.
DK: The editing feels extremely precise — there are no unnecessary scenes. Was this economy of storytelling an important guiding principle for you?
AC: I edit my films myself, and this is sometimes a struggle to get this practice accepted, which for me is the final step of the directing process. I made two films with the producers Films Grand Huit before this one, and they were always very concerned with the duration of the films, and rightly so: festivals are often more willing to take films of 20 minutes or less. And I have a real concern for the viewer, for their capacity for concentration, I don’t want my films to be a bore. And yet, at the same time, I pay great attention to silence, to details that are significant. Nothing is gratuitous or complacent, but I am not ready to sacrifice something that I find truthful or moving to cut minutes.
I was quite surprised when I saw the film again at the Trouville festival by how fragmented and sped the first sequence is. I like it, though. But I wanted to cut a second or two in the next scene, where we meet the other two protagonists, the brother and sister. But, oh well, I’m not the type to touch up my work when it’s done, out of respect for the person I was a few months ago in the editing room. Only one scene from the script was cut during post-production.
And there are two micro-scenes that weren’t done during the shoot due to lack of time: a shot where we were supposed to see the group of the four heroes crossing a huge bridge, and thus making us understand that they had reached the other bank, but in the end we do just fine without it. And there were two final shots planned of the brother and sister cycling, with flower crowns and sun in their hair, something a bit glorious, like they were saints or something. But I have no regrets, the more abrupt ending of the film is the right ending, and if I’d had these extra shots, I don’t think I would have kept them in the film.
DK: The cinematography is simple but poetic. That aerial shot of the two teens drifting down the river is striking, the perfect visual metaphor for the film: a still river, with a dam approaching in the distance, that the drifting adolescents are completely oblivious about. Can you tell us how you approached the visual language?
AC: Since the film was inspired by this landscape of the river between the two banks and is about a group crossing a landscape, I considered the landscape almost as a character, and it seemed interesting to sometimes leave the human point of view to look at the story on a landscape scale, far from the actors. It’s both spectacular and graphic but it also allows us to see how ridiculous and small this whole story is. I had never filmed with a drone before, I find it terribly vulgar, showy and often pointless. But here it made sense.
Moreover, the music [composed by Antoine Glatard] was thought of in this sense: a music that is too big and too strong for the story we are telling, a story on a landscape scale.
DK: You described “Rives” as a “modest film.” Did you mean in terms of budget and production scale?
AC: I mean modest for the story it tells, a story of young adults sharing one afternoon. It’s not a film where I wanted to embrace thunderous or serious subjects, nor revolutionize cinema. I wanted to tell a story and tell it well. I say modest as a carpenter might speak of a chair he has carved from wood. It’s not marble, it’s not inlaid with jewels, it’s not a cathedral, but it’s a good, solid wooden chair.
DK: How long did it take you from concept to finished film?
AC: The time of cinema is always a long time, but I’m very lucky. I wrote the film quickly. The financing is always long, it takes months to get responses from the various financing commissions. I think we received the first grants when I hadn’t yet shot “Totems,” my previous film, or I had just shot it and I was in the editing phase; in any case I was busy enough not to count the days.
Then the film was supposed to be shot for the first time in September 2023, but because of a somewhat fragile prep and the poor weather, we postponed the shoot for a year. So we shot in September ’24. And I edited right after. The film was finished at the beginning of 2025.
DK: What were the biggest challenges of making such a seemingly simple yet layered short?
For me there were two major challenges.
First, the casting. I think that the success of a film is 80% due to its casting. We started the casting process with François Guignard, assisted by Diane Bucaï. That’s when I met Victoria Eber, for whom I immediately fell on a cinematographic level. She was exactly what I imagined Anna, the young woman from the upper class, to be, and she had very good acting intuitions. It’s also when I met Luna Aglat with whom she formed a great duo, and Luna allowed me to deepen the relationship between the two women, to bring more vulnerability and more subtext.
For the boys, we were going with another cast which was more a default option, we hadn’t found exactly what I had in mind, and the shoot was approaching. So postponing it for a year could seem discouraging, but it was a blessing in disguise, because I was able to restart the casting. In the months that followed, I saw the beautiful film my friend Frédéric Lavigne directed, “Cœur perdu,” and I was struck by Guillaume Soubeyran’s presence on screen. I met him and I knew he would be perfect in the part. I wanted people to imagine Germain, the character he plays, as gay without it necessarily being said or emphasized, and bourgeois and a little funny and gentle. And Guillaume has a natural gentleness and the quality of a daydreamer. And for the little brother it was the production manager, Lola Lefebvre, who had the good idea of launching a street casting, of meeting young people from the region of Normandy. That’s where we met Simon Jaspart who is from Dieppe and was 16 or 17 years old. Simon, in addition to being sensitive and having beautiful acting intuitions, also has a gentleness like Guillaume. The shot that moves me the most is a close-up on him looking at his sister at the end of the film, where he just looks at her without saying anything. His gaze seems so powerful to me. I’m a bit too sensitive and I cried several times during editing because of, or thanks to, this shot.
The other challenge was the entire shoot. I really like writing, it’s a time when you’re comfortable and where everything is possible. But shooting is confronting reality. And this confrontation can be violent. And this shoot was horrible, it was “Lost in La Mancha.” Every day there was a new incident, a new breakdown, an accident. Every night I would ask myself, how are we going to do it tomorrow? But we got through it. Fortunately there were remarkable people on the team, benevolent and efficient, and we stuck together. I think above all of the director of photography, Hubert Cyrille, who is very talented and resilient and resourceful, and the gaffer, Bertrand Motte. We don’t talk enough about gaffers, but he was a huge force for the film thanks to how efficient he is, and also thanks to his temperament: Like Cyrille, he was very positive and he loved the work he was doing. And the script supervisor, Marie de Chassey, is a friend, and I could use a laugh to steam down the pressure. But yes, it was tough. For the actors, too, in swimsuits when it was actually very cold and it was raining half the time. Which you can’t see on screen. That’s the magic of cinema!
DK: I know you’re working on your first feature film now, and that the script is based on a book you wrote, can you please share more details with us?
AC: It’s an adaptation of my book “Lullaby for Octave and Paul,” which is about the grieving process of a gay couple whose adopted child succumbs to an accident. One of the two fathers is a musician who is a little known. As they go through this insurmountable ordeal, a politician from a conservative movement uses their drama to feed her hate speech during an interview. Their grief becomes a public debate. It’s a story that explores several themes — fatherhood, grief, homophobia — and which questions the relationship between intimacy and politics.
It’s a story that I’ve been carrying with me for a long time, and what is scary and surprising is how much it seems more and more relevant with the uninhibited rise of xenophobia and the hatred of difference in the world. I have acted in most of my films, and my first desire and my first intuition is to act in this film too. Right now this is the question that is occupying me while we are correcting the script one last time before we start looking for financing.
DK: Anything else you’d like to add?
AC: Thank you for these questions, I loved answering them. And long live desire-led films!