Deauville, Centre international de Deauville, Lexington Auditorium, September 13 2025
The 51st edition of the Deauville American Film Festival will be remembered as the year Kristen Stewart marked a turning point in her artistic career, moving from iconic actress to first-time filmmaker with a boldness that few anticipated but many welcomed. Known worldwide since her teenage years for the Twilight saga, Kristen Stewart has long since freed herself from that label by following an unpredictable path through auteur cinema, working with directors as diverse as Woody Allen, Kelly Reichardt, Pablo Larraín and David Cronenberg, before finding a true anchor in French cinema thanks to Olivier Assayas. This year, she returned to Deauville with The Chronology of Water, an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir, which impressed the jury enough to earn the Revelation Prize. That award, while prestigious, seems almost secondary to the impression left by her presence: a filmmaker in the making, unafraid of risk, relying on her instinct to give shape to a deeply personal narrative. Her arrival at Deauville was not a mere stop on a festival circuit but a homecoming of sorts, as she herself insisted on being there, echoing the affection she had felt when she was honored by the festival in 2019.
The highlight of her stay was not only the presentation of her debut film but the carte blanche that followed, a rare and intimate encounter between a cinephile and her audience. On September 13, Kristen Stewart walked into a packed hall where every seat was taken, the anticipation palpable, and joined journalist Lily Bloom to talk about the French films that shaped her journey. The event, initially scheduled for a more restrained timeframe, quickly spilled over, as the actress-turned-director, animated by passion, refused to cut short her reflections. For more than ninety minutes, she spoke with candor and vulnerability, describing her selections not as academic choices but as personal revelations, mirrors in which she recognized fragments of herself. The audience, far from being passive, leaned in with every word, savoring her sincerity, and even when two titles were left out of the detailed discussion due to time, no one seemed to mind. It was the energy of the conversation itself, its unpolished and instinctive nature, that gave the encounter its strength.
Her words about Les Amants du Pont-Neuf by Leos Carax perfectly illustrated this instinctive connection. She recalled being mesmerized by Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant running and clashing with all the force of desperate love. To her, these characters embodied the impossibility of controlling another’s freedom, a realization that resonates with anyone who has loved too fiercely. “Feelings are like fireworks,” she explained, “they explode, beyond words.” That intensity, she admitted, is what continues to draw her to French cinema, where sensitivity is heightened, intimacy magnified, and emotions are given space to spill over rather than being neatly contained. The way she described it suggested less of a film lesson than a confession, as though the cinema she cherishes is one that allows her to breathe and exist without compromise.
Her cinephile identity revealed itself further through her fascination with adaptations, a theme that directly mirrors her own choice to adapt The Chronology of Water. When discussing Une vraie jeune fille by Catherine Breillat, she emphasized its importance as a film about the turbulence of adolescence, describing how it came to her at exactly the right moment—when her own ideas for filmmaking were fermenting. She spoke of the way certain films arrive unbidden, “the right book, the right sound, the right film, at the right time,” and how such encounters can multiply creativity. Her admiration for La Pianiste by Michael Haneke, adapted from Elfriede Jelinek, went even further: she reread the novel after seeing the film, marveling at the way Haneke dared to strip away the novel’s torrent of words and entrust everything to the silence and presence of Isabelle Huppert. In that silence, she found a form of truth, a lesson in adaptation that she clearly carried into her own work. These reflections painted the portrait of an artist not only inspired by cinema but constantly in dialogue with literature, an “obsessive of words” who finds in adaptation the perfect space between text and image.
Not all of her comments were analytical, and that made them even more compelling. Speaking about La Double Vie de Véronique by Krzysztof Kieślowski, she admitted being unable to explain its impact, saying it was a film “that one feels more than one explains.” The candor of that admission revealed something essential about Kristen Stewart: her relationship with cinema is visceral rather than intellectual, grounded in sensation rather than interpretation.
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