Shana (Eva Huault) has nothing going for her. Her toxic lover is in prison. She works a dead-end food service job, to the ridicule of her bougie family, who she shares a, at best, fraught relationship with due to past strife. Her grandmother just died, but she left her a ring, a striking gold bird-shaped piece adorned with emeralds. Reportedly, it will protect her from bad luck, and whether she’s emboldened by that idea or by the sheer force of her personality, Shana decides to ditch her partner, absconding with the thousands of euros he left in her care in an attempt to start fresh.
That’s only the beginning of what fast morphs into a chain reaction of myriad troubles and anxiety-inducing scenarios that mount before Shana in writer and director Lila Pinell’s comedy/drama of the same name premiering in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which I could teasingly refer to as “Uncut Gems for girls.” There’s more to Pinell’s consistently funny and sneakily devastating film, however. The wrestling with identity that runs throughout the film, for instance, crops up early, first with Shana’s grandmother denigrating her Arab origins, and then with Shana evading her Jewish heritage and absorbing slurs like blows (her lover, for instance, frequently calls her a “dirty Jew”), even as she reluctantly partakes in its traditions (Passover dinner, her younger sister’s bat mitzvah).
But the movie actually opens with Shana losing her cool over a roleplaying game she’s playing with a group of friends; it’s a clear indicator of her turbulent personality, cutting and self-centered because the hard knocks she’s taken have driven her to prioritize self-preservation, and brought vividly to life by the impressively forceful Huault. It’s a star-making performance aided by a close and longstanding director/actor partnership, and in no small part due to the fact that she appears in virtually every scene of Shana, plowing through the chaos with a quick wit and even quicker tongue. She plays up the humor inherent in Pinell’s debut feature. Her hushed, disruptive conversation with her mother and subsequent abrupt cutting-off of the rabbi’s attempt to flirt with her at her grandmother’s funeral is a scene ripped straight from any family comedy.
But there’s a streak of genuine hurt and fury that simmers throughout Shana until it finally explodes. When her partner, newly released from prison, verbally assaults her, she doesn’t hurl insults back at him the way we see her do with others. She inclines her head, slumps her shoulders, and her usually loud voice turns meek; in another affecting turn of Huault’s performance, we can see her retreat inside herself. Conversely, the film’s centerpiece— an emotional confrontation between Shana and her mother during which the former lays bare how the latter left her in foster care to go off with a new lover during her teenage years— is far more demonstrative, but Pinell skillfully builds the scene so that what starts as righteous anger on the part of Shana, defensiveness on the part of the mother, naturally morphs into a tearful shouting match. It’s an integral piece of the film, smartly placed toward the start of Shana’s labyrinthine series of money troubles and poor decision-making that helps endear her to the audience, and it plays with far more sincerity than some of the film’s more blatant attempts at stirring up empathy (at the end of the film, Shana confesses to a friend that she has distanced herself from her Jewish roots partly because she supports Palestine, and while well-intentioned, her statements read as overly manufactured in a manner that nearly feels out of character). Shot between the upper crust Paris spaces her family circulates and the grimier neighborhoods where Shana chooses to spend her time on 16 mm that grants the characters and their environments a more lived-in feel, Shana is an assured first feature and a bracing coming-of-age story for adults that shows that breaking free of toxic relationships— familial and romantic— is messy and difficult, but possible. Sometimes, you have to make your own luck.
Shana had its world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Runtime: 80 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 