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Gabin film image; boy looking at a cow

When Maxence Voiseux first films Gabin Jourdel, he is eight years old — the youngest child in a farming family in rural northern France. Over the next decade, we witness Gabin’s growth and the animals, schoolwork, chores, and imagined futures that define his youth. His father wants him to inherit the butcher shop, but Gabin is more concerned with living animals — and in helping save his mother’s cattle farm from financial ruin.

Voiseux’s feature documentary debut has the patience to let its conflict unfold without wringing it for drama. Her access is extraordinary precisely for its ordinariness: time moves without declaring itself, and the camera joins its subjects for family arguments, quiet work, and the small changes that mark the passage of adolescence. Premiering in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Gabin turns coming of age into a question of inheritance, following a child’s tenderness toward animals as it becomes a young man’s fight for a life of his own choosing.

 

Media Partner

Director
Featuring

Gabin Jourdel, Patricia Jourdel, Dominique Jourdel, Lilou Duflos-Lamotte, Catherine Ranson

Credits
Country of Origin

France/Germany/
Switzerland

Year

2026

Language

In French with English subtitles

Film Contact
18+
105 min
Alter Ego Production

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Saturday October 03

11:45 am
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
International Village 10
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Saturday October 10

6:45 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
International Village 10
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Credits & Director

Producer

Cécile Lestrade, Elise Hug

Screenwriter

Maxence Voiseux

Cinematography

François Chambe, Martin Roux

Editor

Pascale Hannoyer, Natali Barrey

Original Music

Nicolas Rabaeus

Maxence Voiseux headshot

Maxence Voiseux

Maxence Voiseux was born in the Ardennes in 1988. He studied science before switching paths to join the Documentary Cinema programme at Paris VII University, where he trained in directing and editing. Gabin (2026) is his first feature film.

Photo by Alter Ego Production

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