In Katharina Rivilis’ sure knockout of a film “I’ll Be Gone in June,” two worlds of stifling teenage solitude collide at the same time as America mournfully recovers from the jihadist hijacking of four commercial airliners in September 11, 2001, which led to the leveling of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and the U.S. government’s colonial “war on terror” in Afghanistan, among other atrocities.
A widely televised violence, the images of 9/11 are among the most shocking and enduring images the world has ever seen, sadly to the point of heightening America’s messianic complex and the anti-Muslim rhetoric across the globe — and perhaps what made most Americans, and white people at large, so inured to livestreamed genocides. In this way, “I’ll Be Gone in June” converses with the current terror even as the film is set in the past, capturing what it’s like to witness a violence of this scale play out in real-time, especially for not-so-clueless young people at the turn of the millennium.
I’m not surprised the project was boarded by Road Movies, the Berlin-based production company attached to Wim Wenders, who himself was residing in the U.S. during the events of 9/11 and made his own film, 2004’s “Land of Plenty,” about its aftermath, inescapably sharing a sort of kinship with Rivilis’ first feature.
Shot for over 50 days, the result is a poetically probing movie that features the teenager protagonist Franny (Naomi Cosma, in a breakout leading role) as the German-Russian filmmaker’s self-insert in an effort to belatedly wrestle with some of her own history as an exchange student from Germany in 2001 chasing the American Dream by first settling in the sleepy town of Las Cruces, New Mexico before setting out for either New York or California to embrace all the incredible things it has to offer. Except none of the latter would pan out as Franny (and the director’s teenage self) aspired to. With a botched future ahead of her, Franny has to grapple with the new reality around her, at least until June, until she moves back to Germany for good.
While the desert town seems so far removed from the big city, it makes for a perfectly fertile terrain for a semi-autobiographical movie, whose characters aren’t exactly itching to ditch the last vestiges of their youth, even as they contemplate their identities amidst a world still reeling from a massive tragedy, the trauma of which is not lost on Franny after having lived and struggled in Berlin Wall-era Germany, except now she’s an outlander. It’s a lived experience that readily crystallizes whenever fellow teens teasingly take a swipe at her identity, including such remarks as “Nazi girl.”
Unlike most small, tight-knit towns, Las Cruces — debut budget-friendly and timeless enough to evoke 2001 — isn’t exactly free of distractions, either. Moving from one military host family to another, Franny coasts through her “alien” life, attending awkward classes, mingling at off-campus (and surprisingly not-coked-up) parties, or lazing about by the pool. She’s often with the likes of the freewheeling Sam (Bianca Dumais) and fellow exchange student Ida (Rebecca Schulz, returning from 2015’s “Ariana Forever!”) — a kind of sisterhood that makes the searching nature of her present predicament a lot less lonely.
Structured à la “The Little Prince,” Rivilis’ Un Certain Regard beauty is a film of brief, shifting encounters, and the revelations that come with it. At one of the parties, Franny happens upon Elliott (David Flores), the melancholic artist and band vocalist with whom she will strike up a deep bond, which snaps into focus in the film’s second half. 2001 is a year of drastic transition, and Franny and Elliott are two adrift souls trying to make sense of the new world around them and finding tenderness in each other.
Rivilis leverages this intimate connection into a trenchant meditation on the turmoil of living as outsiders, in one way or another, in an environment where everybody is suddenly way more skeptical of people or things unfamiliar to them, from heightened border patrol post-9/11 to Franny being asked by her homestay family not to speak German around their foster child. Clearly, the impact of 9/11 on these lives is so sweeping and urgent that calling it “terrible news” might not simply suffice. And this sense of mutual alienation, of being neither here nor there, that Franny and Elliott live with suggests that the political is no longer seen from a potentially abstract place and finally bleeds into realm of the personal.
As a sort of video diary, Franny shoots her everyday affairs on a camcorder, whose lens is often close up on the faces of the people she encounters, allowing the audience to access the protagonist’s more intimate and therefore less mediated view of the world, in much the same way as the TV newsreel footage of 9/11 that punctuates the proceedings lends this remembered past a kind of raw texture and sense of exigency. Together, they evoke how personal memory can either accentuate or warp a collective experience.
This aesthetic approach is in sharp contrast to the film’s otherwise crisp digital images, courtesy of the Alexa 35, which render Las Cruces into a lyrical, longing landscape evoking entire histories, in all its deep blues and soft yet stifling oranges. But the dramatic delight lies in how Rivilis and cinematographer Giulia Schelhas activate the setting as a character on its own — one that holds up a mirror to Franny, growing less hostile and distant, and even more romantic, as she does over the course of the film.
Elsewhere, the female duo invokes some breaking of the fourth wall for good measure, just as the film, at points, entertains conspiratorial views regarding 9/11, perhaps to dispel the idea that this work is solely an exercise in verisimilitude.
The movie’s stylistic manipulations also reflect on its generous mix of anachronistic and modern music, from the blues and rock sound of the ‘50s (Nina Simone’s “Wild Is the Wind”) to the punk-grunge, pop, and alternative sound of today (a reinterpretation of PJ Harvey’s cover of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife”), to classic Spanish-language music (Chavela Vargas’ “La Llorona”). It’s a formal curio that intermittently trades the film’s pensive tone for a livewire spirit. At the same time, it allows the story to lean on the power of pop culture nostalgia (which was part of what drew Franny to the U.S.) and flout it too, careful not to get lost in that register.
Central to this masterful drama is, of course, the emotional perceptiveness Cosma packs into their performance, which is pretty rewarding to watch, wistfully embodying the friction engendered by Franny’s refusal to wallow in self-surrender and instead tries to figure out where she goes from here, as reality catches up with the kind of life she has envisioned for herself. And it helps that Rivilis doesn’t infantilize Franny or the rest of the movie’s young characters.
That the overall performances feel so naturally alive and attuned to the language of adolescents also has a lot to do with the improvisation involved in the work of the young non-actors Rivilis spotted in New Mexico. This is especially evident in a classroom scene in which the teenagers are pressed by their teacher about the “right” response to 9/11, and the students come up with vastly different answers that sound so in-the-moment rather than anything premeditated, answers that people of their age would actually say.
Whereas the others promote colonialist rhetoric and argue about conquering the world and exacting revenge — something we’ve seen play out in the case of Afghanistan, or still seeing play out in the current situation in Iran — one student, who is in the same class as his twin brother, replies rather pointedly: “I don’t know what we should be doing. It could be a lost cause. It could be the right move. It could be another Vietnam. It could be a very short conflict. I think we should wait some more time and question ourselves, and see what the right plan is and maybe scheme a little more, but going head first into this does not seem like the right decision.” Sound familiar?
“I’ll Be Gone in June” draws us into these conversations, which extend outside of school and therefore outside of this film, as proof that these characters are anything but passive — that young people actually have something to contribute, including those who were born after 9/11, or any historic cruelties for that matter. It is in this openness, the film suggests, that perhaps we can arrive at some sober, empathetic answers in the face of the world’s present horrors. Indeed, it is this lack of openness that made so many of us socially and politically stunted. And the film, I’m happy to report, doesn’t have to bend over backwards to make its point.
As we might have instantly gleaned from the film’s title, the endgame has already been determined, but that doesn’t mean it’s less mesmerizing to witness or that the director won’t offer her protagonist the grace she deserves. With this shrewdly spellbinding debut from Rivilis, we may just have come across a promising visionary in our midst.
Grade: A-
“I’ll Be Gone in June” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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