I’ll Be Gone in June by Katharina Rivilis

It is 2001. Franny (Naomi Cosma), a sixteen-year-old exchange student from Germany, arrives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, imagining an America shaped by cinema and teenage mythology. What she encounters instead is a desert town defined by boredom, military families, awkward school rituals and a quiet social isolation that feels both deeply local and strangely universal. Then September 11 happens.

Rivilis does not treat 9/11 as spectacle. She observes its diffusion: the way fear enters ordinary life slowly before becoming structure. Television screens begin producing a new emotional climate built around patriotism, suspicion and national belonging. The War on Terror does not yet exist as policy, but it already emerges psychologically, reorganising how America sees itself and how it sees others. Heroes are manufactured. Military language enters everyday speech. Islam becomes increasingly associated with threat. Patriotism expands beyond ideology and becomes social expectation, even for those who exist at its margins.

Viewed from today, Rivilis’s film almost operates as a precursor to the structural tensions that continue to define contemporary America, tracing the emotional and cultural conditions that would later feed today’s violent polarisation, exclusionary nationalism and forms of Trump-era political radicalisation.

Las Cruces becomes an especially effective setting precisely because of its contradictions. Located close to the Mexican border, the city operates as a frontier space where questions of belonging remain unstable. National identity appears performative and fragile at the same time. The film quietly reveals the paradox of a country built through migration while increasingly retreating into defensive definitions of citizenship and loyalty.

At the centre remains Franny, beautifully played by Naomi Cosma, who enters America carrying another historical transition within herself. Coming from Germany shortly after the social transformations produced by reunification and the accelerated absorption of post-socialist Europe into global capitalism, Franny moves through America with the gaze of someone simultaneously inside and outside history. She observes, and her own displacement becomes analytical.

Around her emerge the familiar emotional ecosystems of adolescence: misfits, boredom, heat, failed attempts at belonging and first love. Elliott (David Flores), melancholic and emotionally withdrawn, offers the film its emotional counterpoint. Their relationship develops with remarkable restraint, avoiding romantic idealisation while capturing something more fragile: two young people recognising loneliness inside one another before possessing the language to articulate it.

Rivilis demonstrates particular intelligence in understanding adolescence politically without turning it into thesis. The teenagers inhabit a moment where historical trauma and personal formation become inseparable. They inherit media narratives before developing ideological frameworks to process them. Television becomes educator. Fear becomes atmosphere. National identity becomes performance.

Shot by cinematographer Giulia Schelhas with extraordinary sensitivity to desert light and empty space, I’ll Be Gone in June constructs New Mexico as both geographical landscape and emotional condition. Vastness becomes existential. The desert absorbs uncertainty rather than resolving it.

More than a film about 9/11, Rivilis has made a film about the invisible transformations that follow historical shock. About how politics enters ordinary life through language, media and emotion before appearing as ideology. About how adolescence often becomes the first territory where societies rehearse their future anxieties.

The result is one of Un Certain Regard’s strongest discoveries this year: a debut feature that understands history not as event but as atmosphere, and youth not as innocence but as a space where political realities quietly begin to sediment.

Following its Cannes premiere, and with Wim Wenders among its producers, I’ll Be Gone in June has already secured German and Swiss distribution through DCM, while Paris-based Luxbox is handling international sales, positioning Katharina Rivilis’s debut for wider international circulation beyond the festival circuit.