Gabin: remarkable documentary captures a boy’s coming of age in a changing French farming community

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

Maxence Voiseux’s documentary opens on a father doing what so many other parents have done before him: staring a little too long at his child’s face over breakfast, trying to figure out who he looks like. Generational connection, we’ll learn, is important to this man, Dominique Jourdel, a downtrodden butcher from Artois who hopes to keep his business in the family. And so he studies his son, eight-year-old Gabin, as though the boy’s eyes were portals to their family forebears, wondering what has been passed on or what may be. Voiseux’s films perform a similar act – peering as they do through generations of Jourdels. The director has spent the last 13 years filming the Artois farming family in various palimpsestic guises – first for his graduate short film Of Men and Beasts (2014), a study of the traditional rites and rituals of the Arras livestock market, where he first met Gabin’s grandfather, André Jourdel. Then for The Heirs (2016), a mid-length documentary about the Jourdel siblings – Dominique among them – grappling with how to divvy up responsibilities on their farmland. When editing his way through this family saga, Voiseux began to notice the youngest Jourdel, Gabin, a funny eight-year old boy of surprising emotional sensitivity, and decided he had to be his next subject. He kept on shooting, resulting in this time-spanning documentary, which follows Gabin from his 8th to his 18th birthday. 

Voiseux avoids any easy guidance through Gabin’s years; there is no voiceover, no montage or check-in interviews with the director. Richard Linklater’s feature Boyhood (2014) (to which this film will inevitably be compared, along with Michael Apted’s Up series) relied on era-relevant pop songs to denote its protagonist’s passing years. But here our only temporal clues lie in Gabin’s changing body and facial features – first subtle, then startling, like a coming-of-age in flipbook. Through the subtlest shifts in editing, we travel through a run of different haircuts and body transformations until Gabin is suddenly a shaggy-haired teen in John Lennon-style double denim. The longitudinal documentary is something we’ve seen many times before, but when done well it casts on viewers the same kind of spell a new baby has on its parent – making us feel it’s the first to ever exist. 

It’s easy to see why Voiseux became fixated on Gabin – modest without being shy, uncertain but outspoken, he’s the kind of child who can send an adult into an existential crisis through the thoughtfulness of their questions. As he reaches his preteen years, Gabin’s parents, Dominique and Patricia, become worried about his poor performance in foreign languages, but the perceptive Gabin is affected by far more adult burdens. He tells a school friend that their farm is going bankrupt, saying through tears: “I’ll take the cows with me.” Children will always find ways to cosplay their parents’ anxieties – moments after Gabin reveals his family need a tedder machine for haymaking,Voiseux shows him purchasing a virtual one inside a video game called ‘Farming’. There is a continual sense of erosion here, of a region depleted by the force of modernisation and globalisation. When Gabin wanders through the handsome, dusky wideshots of the Artois landscape, it’s often to a backdrop of the ruins of Mont-Saint-Éloi Abbey, a building once pillaged for stone during the French revolution. 

In Gabin’s early childhood, Voiseux shoots in 4:3, keeping him at the centre of the frame, boxed in by adult expectation to follow their path into agriculture. His dad would like him to work at the butcher shop, but his mother needs help on her small dairy farm. Gabin says he only wants to work with “living animals”. Or maybe he should leave Artois altogether. 

Gabin has an easygoing affection for his hardworking mother, a gentle woman with a silent laugh and open-mouthed smile whose hair he idly twirls on car journeys. She’s patient with Gabin’s struggles. But his father – a perpetually disappointed man with a back bent by years of labour – regards him with gruffness, believing “hard work” is the real solution to every Gabin problem. The director’s intimacy with the Jourdels allows the film to become a portrait of parenthood as much as boyhood. Without probing, he captures the strain of their divergent views on parenting. But there is neutral territory in Catherine, his after-school tutor; their frank conversations are a key to Gabin’s otherwise locked-off inner life. 

Voiseux took a risk with Gabin, whose natural stoicism could have bled the film of any conflict (there is scarcely a voice raised), but there is a cumulative power to travelling alongside him, with the same question always hanging overhead: should I stay, or should I go? Gabin will eventually choose the latter, leaving the country to explore a world beyond the farm that has been in his family for generations. But we sense he is not done with Artois, any more than Voiseux is done with the Jourdels.