Abdellatif Kechiche and the trilogy “Mektoub, My Love,” behind the scenes of a disappearance and a return

"You'll see, this year is definitely the right one, I know a guy who's working on the editing." For three years now, we've been hearing this phrase without fail, in the days leading up to the Cannes selection announcement, at least one very self-confident person uttering it, usually supplemented by a clarification that diminishes its reliability ("Well, I don't know him personally, but my roommate plays padel with him"). This isn't enough to dash the secret hope, rekindled each time, of finally seeing Abdellatif Kechiche's eighth film arrive, seven years after its shooting, at the end of a post-production tunnel that we thought would never see fruition. Eighth and perhaps last, because while the film itself will finally be born—it will indeed be presented in competition at the Locarno Festival in Switzerland in early August —the touchy director, alas, threatens to disappear.

Struck by a stroke in mid-March, Kechiche now suffers from difficulties with oral and written speech which do not affect his reasoning in any way ( "He has even become wiser in a certain way," according to a close friend) but which can complicate