{"id":2307,"date":"2026-05-25T13:57:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T13:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/05\/25\/ill-be-gone-in-june-review-wispy-but-atmospheric-drama-follows-a-german-student-to-new-mexico-in-2001\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T13:57:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T13:57:00","slug":"ill-be-gone-in-june-review-wispy-but-atmospheric-drama-follows-a-german-student-to-new-mexico-in-2001","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/05\/25\/ill-be-gone-in-june-review-wispy-but-atmospheric-drama-follows-a-german-student-to-new-mexico-in-2001\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019ll Be Gone in June\u2019 Review: Wispy but Atmospheric Drama Follows a German Student to New Mexico in 2001"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p> \tGerman teenager Franny (newcomer Naomi Cosma) arrives in New Mexico to spend the 2001-02 academic year at a high school in Las Cruces, living with a local family, just before the terrorist attacks of 9\/11 in writer-director Katharina Rivilis\u2019 wispy but engaging debut feature. <\/p>\n<p> \tEven if you didn\u2019t know that this was inspired by Rivilis\u2019 own teenage experience as an exchange student back in the day you would probably guess from the way nothing really happens, apart from friends getting made, places being seen and hearts being negligibly fractured. Nevertheless, as befits a film partly backed by Wim Wenders\u2019 Road Movies, this deploys an eclectic soundtrack and lashings of backlighting and magic hour cinematography to help capture the uncanny feeling of being a European stranger in a strange land of enchantment out west. Rivilis also coaxes confident, naturalistic performances from her non-professional cast, who largely improvised their dialogue, making this a good fit for festivals with young audiences. \u00a0  \t<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<h3 id=\"title-of-a-story\">  \t \t \t\t \t\t\t\t\tI&#8217;ll Be Gone in June\t\t \t <\/h3>\n<p><span>The Bottom Line<\/span> \t\t\t\t\t<span> \t \tJust like the old days. \t<\/span> \t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><strong>Venue:<\/strong> Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)<br \/><strong>Cast:<\/strong> Naomi Cosma, David Flores, Bianca Dumais, Rebecca Schulz<br \/><strong>Director\/screenwriter: <\/strong>Katharina Rivilis<br \/>\t\t\t \t\t\t<span> \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t2 hours 5 minutes\t\t\t<\/span> \t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p> \tAlthough Franny doesn\u2019t say much, she\u2019s all eyes and ears, observing closely everything from the moment she touches down in Albuquerque to meet her host family. But Franny is no na\u00eff, and having grown up in East Germany until the Wall came down as well as possessing a natural intelligence and street smarts, she quickly picks up that things aren\u2019t quite right in the home of the Garcias, her host family. While the parents, Tony and Eve Garcia seem nice at first, Franny quickly works out that they\u2019re less open to cultural exchange than one would expect. Plus, the fact that they\u2019ve taken in foster child Patty has less to do with kindness than avarice since they get an income for it from social services. They even leave Franny, Patty and their daughter Robin in the car one afternoon so they can go inside a casino for hours.  \t<\/p>\n<p> \tAfter Franny works out that Eve seems to be confiscating some of her possessions, maybe to sell them, and they fight over who she\u2019s making friends with, Franny goes to live with another family. The mother this time works at Franny\u2019s high school and they seem to have more money judging by the presence of a pool in the backyard. Best of all, they keep Franny on a very long leash and sort of disappear from the movie soon after this as Franny, when not in school, spends more and more time with other teens.<\/p>\n<p> \tHer new friends include Sam (Bianca Dumais), a rock-chick type who\u2019s the same age as Franny and who has developed a reputation for promiscuity around town that doesn\u2019t seem deserved. (It\u2019s hinted that she may be the victim of abuse.) Franny quickly develops a friendship circle that includes kids who like to party but seem basically pretty nice, while she also sometimes hangs out with straighter but sweet fellow German exchange student Ida (Rebecca Schulz, who appeared in one of Rivilis\u2019 shorts).<\/p>\n<p> \tBut the most exciting new relationship turns out to be with Elliot (David Flores), a handsome boy with hair and cheekbones like 1990s-vintage Johnny Depp, who sings in a band and works at a drive-up diner where he serves customers while wearing roller skates. The fact that the adults don\u2019t approve of him because he reportedly takes drugs makes him all the more attractive to Franny. After a romantic trip to the white sands of the desert and swoony kisses (filmed by a constantly circling camera, very pop video), Franny is thoroughly smitten and soon starts moping when he fails to call her back. He\u2019s a teenage boy, afraid of commitment, and completely oblivious to the fact that she\u2019s probably the most interesting person he\u2019s ever going to meet.  \t<\/p>\n<p> \tAs the months pass, much less noticeably thanks to the Southwest weather than they would back in Franny\u2019s hometown of Brandenburg, she grows accustomed to the strange ways and customs of small-town American life, which at this juncture is suffused with the patriotism that gripped the country in the wake of the attacks. Rivilis manages to get across how weird it all is to her protagonist\/stand-in without being patronizing about \u201cdumb\u201d Americans barely aware of what\u2019s going on in the next county over, let alone Europe and the Middle East. A scene in a high-school civics class where students debate retaliatory invasions abroad, half of them paying attention and the other half goofing off, suggests what an uphill battle it is for teachers to break through the apathy and boredom \u2014 and this was before social media.<\/p>\n<p> \tIn fact, the film effectively becomes a nostalgic glimpse at a teenage way of life that\u2019s almost disappeared, when kids talked to each other and hung out IRL much more and didn\u2019t spend every waking minute with eyes glued to screens. Those were the days.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>German teenager Franny (newcomer Naomi Cosma) arrives in New Mexico to spend the 2001-02 academic year at a high school in Las Cruces, living with a local family, just before the terrorist attacks of 9\/11 in writer-director Katharina Rivilis\u2019 wispy but engaging debut feature. Even if you didn\u2019t know that this was inspired by Rivilis\u2019 own teenage experience as an exchange student back in the day you would probably guess from the way nothing really happens, apart from friends getting made, places being seen and hearts being negligibly fractured. Nevertheless, as befits a film partly backed by Wim Wenders\u2019 Road Movies, this deploys an eclectic soundtrack and lashings of backlighting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2308,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[423,307,641,2,59,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cannes","category-cannes-2026","category-cannes-film-festival","category-hollywood","category-movie-reviews","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}