Ulysse © ARP 2026
Ulysse : Laetitia Masson’s letter
Un Certain Regard closes this 79th edition with Laetitia Masson, a fitting filmmaker for this selection, given her keen sense of innovative storytelling and powerful subjects. With Ulysse, the filmmaker follows the journey of a child with a genetic syndrome from his birth until his eighteenth birthday. She’s the perfect person to introduce her own film.
I’m absolutely delighted to return to Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category with my film “Ulysse” because the film is exactly that, a certain look at what is different.
It is a project inspired by real, very personal facts. The film tells the story of a unique child, following his trajectory to the age of 18. Will he be able to find his place in the world, despite his disability?
I wanted the film to be a buddy movie where mother and child are like Chaplin and the Kid, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, faced with tragicomical situations. Little by little, the entire world rejects them, but they persevere because they are together.
I didn’t want to direct a naturalist, dark, mournful film, but rather the opposite, a true fanciful, luminous work with a political and poetic dimension.
“Ulysse” questions normalcy, how society perceives us and what it expects from us and its most fragile population. What is hiding behind a system that is pretending to be virtuous and protective, but is in fact humanely blind?
I asked Elodie Bouchez to play Alice, Ulysse’s mom, because I knew that she possessed gentleness and imagination, but above all a profound humanity and that she would be able to accept the uniqueness of the children surrounding her. Humanity also characterizes Stanislas Merhar, Romane Bohringer, Gringe and above all, the atypical children in the film.
