‘Gabin’ Review: A French Farm Boy Grows Up, Both Fast and Slow, in a Marvelous Cannes Discovery

May 14, 2026 11:13am PT

‘Gabin’ Review: A French Farm Boy Grows Up, Both Fast and Slow, in a Marvelous Cannes Discovery

Shot over a decade as it follows its young, inchoate but warmly sympathetic subject from ages eight to 18, Maxence Voiseux's thoroughly involving documentary premieres in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar.

“Gabin” is far from the first film — nonfiction or otherwise — to make a longterm investment in a child protagonist, training a camera on them over years as adulthood gradually approaches. Maxence Voiseux‘s film has obvious precedents in such documentary projects as Michael Apted’s landmark “7 Up” series and Robert David Cochrane’s “Boys of Summer,” as well as, of course, Richard Linklater’s narrative slow-burner “Boyhood.” Somehow, though, the concept feels miraculous every time. There’s something illuminating and ineffably moving about watching someone grow up before your eyes in quasi-timelapse fashion, and especially so in “Gabin,” which packs ten years of one rural village childhood into less than two hours — a remarkably fleet, fluent feat of observation and editing that still conveys its subject’s anxious, ongoing fear that his life might stall before it gets to start.