Dumont’s directorial debut was one of the most acclaimed first films of the past fifteen years, receiving the prestigious Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the Jean Vigo prize and other accolades. Set in a rural, Northern backwater (Bailleul, Dumont’s hometown) similar to the coastal hamlet of Hors Satan, this menacing feature follows a gang of ne'er do well bikers, chiefly epileptic skinhead Freddy, as they loaf over a listless, searing summer. Dumont’s style—contemplative, elliptical, clinical—is as fully formed as is his expansive vision of a world at once contemporary in its banalities and timeless in its perils and rhythms.
