François Ozon’s ‘The Stranger’ Headlines 31st Rendez-Vous with French Cinema Lineup at Film at Lincoln Center

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema returns to Film at Lincoln Center for its 31st edition with a 22-film lineup of contemporary French cinema.

Opening night of Rendez-Vous features the New York premiere of The Stranger, François Ozon’s adaptation of Albert Camus’s landmark novel, which recently garnered four César Award nominations, including Best Actor (Benjamin Voisin) and Best Supporting Actor (Pierre Lottin).

Alpha, Julia Ducournau’s bold return following her Palme d’Or award-winning Titane (NYFF59), closes the festival. A visually striking journey into body-horror unfolding amid a rapidly spreading epidemic, Alpha premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and features a haunting performance by Tahar Rahim.

“It is such an honor to open the new edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with The Stranger, the adaptation of Albert Camus’s classic French novel, in the presence of director François Ozon and actress Rebecca Marder,” said Daniela Elstner, Executive Director of Unifrance. “This remarkable film, along with this year’s selection, is a powerful testament to the diversity and creativity of French cinema today.”

Elstner adds, “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema continues to serve as a cultural bridge between France and the United States, bringing filmmakers and audiences together through a shared love of cinema. At a time of global uncertainty, we are deeply grateful for the strong and solid relationship we have built with our partners at Film at Lincoln Center.”

Florence Almozini, Vice President of Programming at Film at Lincoln Center, said, “The 31st edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema reflects the ever-impressive vitality and artistic ambition of contemporary filmmaking in France. This year’s lineup brings together acclaimed auteurs such as Olivier Assayas, François Ozon, Claire Simon, Pascal Bonitzer, and many exciting new filmmakers, including Leyla Bouzid and Pauline Loquès, to name a few. Film at Lincoln Center is proud to continue this long-standing collaboration with Unifrance, presenting the best of new French cinema to New York audiences.”

This year’s selection welcomes six directors making their festival debut, including the U.S. premiere of Affection Affection, the second feature from Alexia Walther and Maxime Matray, which follows a woman searching for missing persons amid eerie disturbances in an off-season resort town. Also premiering in New York are: Dominik Moll’s Case 137, a gripping procedural starring Léa Drucker as a determined investigator in France’s internal affairs unit; Louise Hémon’s debut feature The Girl in the Snow, set in 1899 in a remote Alpine village; Aurélien Peyre’s Hearts on Fire, a tender portrait of young love across the class divide in the modern age; and Pauline Loquès’s Nino, a portrait of a 29-year-old blindsided by a devastating diagnosis, and stars Unifrance “10 to Watch” honoree Théodore Pellerin.

The lineup features Olivier Assayas’s The Wizard of the Kremlin, starring Jude Law as a fictionalized Vladimir Putin opposite Paul Dano as his mysterious strategist Vladislav; and Jean-Paul Salomé’s The Money Maker, a crime drama starring Reda Kateb as a master French counterfeiter during and after WWII.

Pascal Bonitzer returns with a pair of North American premieres: Hugo, a playful reimagining of Victor Hugo’s world through an actor’s life, written by his late wife Sophie Fillières (This Life of Mine, Rendez-Vous 2025); and Maigret and the Dead Lover, a new take on Georges Simenon’s iconic detective.

Presented by Unifrance and Film at Lincoln Center, the 31st edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, takes place March 5–15, 2026.

FILM DESCRIPTIONS

All films screen at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W. 65th Street)

Opening Night
The Stranger / L’Étranger
François Ozon, 2025, France, 124m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
After teaming with Benjamin Voisin for the actor’s breakout role in Summer of 85 (Rendez-Vous 2021), festival regular François Ozon reunites with that film’s star and a cast that includes Rebecca Marder, Pierre Lottin, Swann Arlaud, and Denis Lavant for a bold new envisioning of Albert Camus’s novel. In a part previously played by Marcello Mastroianni in Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation, Voisin definitively embodies Meursault, the tightly coiled center of a narrative that recounts a murder in Algiers under French colonial rule. While staying faithful to the chilly, fascinating darkness of Camus’s existential classic, Ozon also gives new life to the canonical text, not least by bringing Algeria to the thematic and visual foreground in this adaptation. Shooting in starkly blown-out black-and-white that suggests the oppressive heat of Meursault’s surroundings, Ozon’s sensitive, queer-inflected reading of Camus’s classic rises to the challenge with appropriately enigmatic elegance. Winner of three Lumières Awards, including Best Film and Best Actor. Nominated for four César Awards, including Best Actor (Voisin) and Supporting Actor (Lottin). A Music Box Films release.

Affection Affection
Maxime Matray, Alexia Walther, 2025, France, 102m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
A statue found thrown into a villa’s pool, a mine explosion in the harbor…. As Maxime Matray and Alexia Walther’s playfully enigmatic sophomore feature begins, inexplicable minor disturbances have begun to trouble the calm of a small town on the Côte d’Azur. These isolated events presage more sinister, destabilizing occurances. Matray and Walter focus their narrative around the character of Géraldine (Agathe Bonitzer), who launches her own investigation after her partner and stepdaughter both disappear. Taking adroit advantage of the bracing scenery of the French Riviera, alive with the slight chill of winter, the eccentric yet understated Affection Affection draws viewers into the action via Bonitzer’s character, closely trailing her journey into the tangled motivations of citizens who all have their secrets, while attentively rendering the lesser-seen rhythms and textures of a French resort town during the off-season.

Alpha
Julia Ducournau, 2025, France/Belgium, 122m
French and Berber with English subtitles
After winning the Palme d’Or in 2021 with her body horror triumph Titane (NYFF59), the audacious Julia Ducournau returned to Cannes last year with an even more ambitious and unpredictable new film. When teenager Alpha (Mélissa Boros) returns home from a night of partying with a crude new tattoo, her adolescent recklessness sparks the concern of her doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani), already anxious about the spread of an eerie epidemic causing otherwise healthy people—including Alpha’s charismatic uncle Amin (Tahar Rahim)—to progressively transform, their bodies seemingly turning to marble. Pushing the boundaries of mainstream French filmmaking once again, Ducournau more than delivers on the mystery of this startling premise. Viewers receptive to her bold, uncompromising vision will be entranced by a haunting, beautifully stylized film that’s as resonant as it is mysterious. A NEON release.

At Work / À pied d’œuvre
Valérie Donzelli, 2025, France, 90m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
After burning out on a successful but no-longer-fulfilling photography career, Paul (Bastien Bouillon) decides to return to his first love, fiction. To enable work on a novel, he takes on a series of gig-economy jobs while pursuing an increasingly precarious path, baffling both his ex-wife and his unsupportive parents. The breakout star of Rendez-Vous 2022 selection The Night of the 12th, Bouillon is quietly riveting as an artist in search of spiritual satisfaction no matter what the economic cost. After the intense psychological thriller Just the Two of Us (Rendez-Vous 2024), Valérie Donzelli demonstrates her range and facility with smaller-scaled human drama in her seventh feature as a director, sympathetically following Paul through a series of new challenges and encounters that fuel both his writing and this film’s inquiring spirit. Winner of Best Screenplay at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.

Case 137 / Dossier 137
Dominik Moll, 2025, France, 115m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
December 2018: as the Parisian police force faces an escalating number of civil disturbance complaints during the newly launched populist “yellow-jacket protests,” internal affairs police officer Stéphanie (Léa Drucker, who won the Lumières Award for Best Actress) is assigned to investigate one such case. Facing equal parts hostility from the friends and family of a man badly injured in an incident of police brutality, and skepticism from fellow officers (including her own ex-husband), Stéphanie remains earnestly committed to the pursuit of justice. After winning seven César Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, with his knotty, nuanced investigatory drama The Night of the 12th (Rendez-Vous 2023), Dominik Moll takes an equally balanced look at modern police work and its social context, set against the backdrop of the industrial city of Saint-Dizier (also the setting for this year’s Rendez-Vous selection Meteors). Nominated for eight César Awards, including Best Film, Director, and Actress (Drucker). A Film Movement release.

Colors of Time / La Venue de l’avenir
Cédric Klapisch, 2025, France/Belgium, 124m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
One of the most reliably delightful French filmmakers working over the last 30 years, Cédric Klapisch (Rise, Rendez-Vous 2022) returns with another typically effervescent work. As four cousins gather at their family house in Normandy, Klapisch follows both their present-day reunion and their ancestor’s late-19th-century adventures. Arriving in Paris in 1895 to search for her elusive mother, Adèle (Suzanne Lindon) befriends painters and photographers as the city enters the Belle Époque. Inhabiting a world being rapidly transformed by the visions of Impressionist painters like Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, Adèle is the endearing anchor of Klapisch’s lavish, entrancing recreation of Paris on the cusp of a new golden era in the arts—and the alternately thrilling and unnerving dawn of a new, modern world. A Distrib Films release. Nominated for César Awards for Best Costumes and Production Design.

Enzo
A film by Laurent Cantet, directed by Robin Campillo, 2025, France/Belgium/Italy, 102m
French and Ukrainian with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Over 20 years, Robin Campillo collaborated closely with Laurent Cantet on six films, including 2008’s acclaimed Cannes Palme d’Or winner The Class (NYFF48), as both editor and co-writer. When Cantet died from cancer in 2024, Campillo chose to honor his extraordinary legacy of nuanced, up-to-the-minute social realism by filming their final jointly written screenplay. Talented but failing at school, 16-year-old Enzo (Eloy Pohu) feels alienated from his wealthy, well-meaning family (Pierfrancesco Favino and Élodie Bouchez). Seeking to chart his own path, he struggles to gain a foothold as a construction site apprentice, until a burgeoning friendship with migrant Ukrainian laborer Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi) stirs him out of his unmotivated slump. Sensitively depicting a young man’s sexually ambiguous friendship, Campillo (BPM (Beats Per Minute), NYFF55; Red Island, Rendez-Vous 2024) gently steers this film’s depiction of the intimate reverberations of the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Girl in the Snow / L’Engloutie
Louise Hémon, 2025, France, 98m
French and Occitan with English subtitles
New York Premiere
After arriving to work in a remote Alpine village, idealistic young teacher Aimée (the luminous Galatéa Bellugi) quickly butts up against the archaic superstitions and prejudices of its geographically and culturally isolated residents. As winter’s harsh conditions endanger the town, the villagers turn against the newcomer in their midst, blaming her for every misfortune that befalls them. Following up a series of acclaimed documentaries, Louise Hémon has constructed her first narrative feature around accounts from generations of teachers in her own family, while taking full advantage of the forbidding, spectacular scenery of her mountain setting (cinematographer Marine Atlan earned a César Award nomination). Beyond the film’s ambitious scope and bold style, the prejudices of rural France at the turn of the last century are represented in ways that are startlingly, grimly resonant with this century’s rise of reactionary sentiment worldwide.

The Great Arch / L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche
Stéphane Demoustier, 2025, France/Italy/Denmark, 104m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
In 1983, Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, whose only completed work consisted of four churches and his own house, won a competition to design the Grande Arche, a proposed new Paris landmark that would forever alter the iconic street-view of the Arc de Triomphe. Stéphane Demoustier’s deeply researched, procedurally immersive drama tells the true story of von Spreckelsen (Claes Bang, The Square), who personally won the favor of president François Mitterrand, only to find this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity imperiled in the face of daunting obstacles: endless struggles over the project’s budget, squabbles for control, and his own lack of experience. The all-star cast also includes Swann Arlaud (Anatomy of a Fall), Sidse Babett Knudsen (The Duke of Burgundy), and Quebecois writer-director-actor Xavier Dolan (Mommy), performers who breathe life into a meticulously reconstructed period piece. Nominated for eight César Awards, including Best Director, Actor (Bang), and Supporting Actor (Arlaud, Dolan, and Michel Fau). A Cohen Media Group release.

Guess Who Is Calling? / Le Répondeur
Fabienne Godet, 2025, France, 102m
French and English with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Also part of the ensemble casts from this year’s Rendez-Vous selections Meteors and Love Me Tender, prodigiously talented newcomer Salif Cissé takes center stage in this wry comedy from Fabienne Godet (Lifelines, Rendez-Vous 2021), opposite established French legend Denis Podalydès. Baptiste (Cissé) works as a pet insurance telephone salesman by day, while at night he hones his impression-heavy stand-up act. After one show, impressed novelist Pierre (Podalydès) approaches, and soon the two have developed a new arrangement: Baptiste will take possession of Pierre’s smartphone, and answer any incoming calls and texts in character as Pierre himself, thereby sparing him the hassle of maintaining his unwieldy personal and professional communications and leaving him to work on his latest writing project in peace. Of course, no such seemingly simple plan can go smoothly—but rather than descending into frantic, caustic farce, Guess Who Is Calling? foregrounds the two men’s unlikely friendship with warmth, playfulness, and good humor.

Hearts on Fire / L’Épreuve du feu
Aurélien Peyre, 2025, France, 106m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Returning to his childhood home on a charming island off the northeast coast of France, 19-year-old Hugo (Félix Lefebvre, star of Rendez-Vous 2021 selection Summer of 85) is excited to spend the summer with his new girlfriend, a stunning and sweetly extroverted beautician nicknamed Queen (newcomer Anja Verderosa). But once she arrives, Hugo’s shy sensibility and perennial insecurities start to clash with her brash energy, under the mocking eyes of his snobbish, smugly tight-knit social circle. In his feature debut, Aurélien Peyre depicts an opposites-attract relationship in all its shades, from initial mutual infatuation to reckoning with grown-up questions of compatibility, bringing acute sensitivity and wisdom to an affecting story of young love in the modern age. Nominated for three César Awards, including Best First Film, Female Newcomer (Verderosa), and Male Newcomer (Lefebvre).

Hugo / Victor comme tout le monde
Pascal Bonitzer, 2025, France, 89m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Robert Zucchini (legendary Éric Rohmer collaborator Fabrice Luchini) is preparing a one-man show about the great French novelist and poet Victor Hugo. Struggling to maintain his footing in a contemporary world that’s seemingly passed him by, Robert starts to thaw as he’s reconnected with his estranged daughter Lisbeth (Marie Narbonne). Director Pascal Bonitzer has two films in this year’s Rendez-Vous, reinventing Georges Simenon’s iconic detective in Maigret and the Dead Lover while paying dual tribute here to a pair of French cultural legends: Hugo, and the director’s late wife, Sophie Fillières, who wrote the screenplay. The actress and writer-director died in 2023; her final work as a filmmaker, This Life of Mine, was a highlight of Rendez-Vous 2025. Here, Bonitzer lovingly realizes her characteristically sly, emotionally complex final script.

In a Whisper / À voix basse
Leyla Bouzid, 2026, France/Tunisia, 113m
French and Arabic with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Having long ago relocated to Paris, Lilia (Eya Bouteraa) returns home to her native Tunisia for the funeral of her beloved uncle. While her own sexual orientation and the details of her private life, including the existence of her girlfriend, are a mystery to her family, Lilia’s secrets find unexpected resonance when surprising details emerge about her uncle’s own personal affairs—and the potential circumstances of his death. In her third feature, Tunisian-born filmmaker Leyla Bouzid (A Tale of Love and Desire, Rendez-Vous 2022) refuses to present a sensationalist or judgmental perspective on culture clashes over sexuality, morality, and assimilation. Rejecting simplistic assumptions, In a Whisper instead offers a subtle, nuanced study of complicated, specific yet universally recognizable familial dynamics, grounded in a fascinating look at contemporary Tunisian society and its slowly shifting cultural mores.

The Little Sister / La Petite Dernière
Hafsia Herzi, 2025, France/Germany, 113m
French and Arabic with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Devout Muslim teenager Fatima (Nadia Melliti) lives with her loving Algerian immigrant family in Paris, but fears the inevitable fallout if her tradition-minded kin discover her identity as a lesbian. Initially wary of her own sexuality and eager to downplay it, Fatima blossoms when she meets Ji-na (Return to Seoul star and 2026 Unifrance honoree Park Ji-Min), but challenges await the nascent couple. In her fourth directorial effort, Hafsia Herzi (also acclaimed for her captivating performances in The Rapture, a 2024 Rendez-Vous selection, and The Secret of the Grain) rejects the clichés of queer coming-of-age stories, which so often center around tragedy and trauma. Instead, Herzi centers one young girl’s relatively drama-free journey of self-discovery and coming out, one telling incident at a time. A true discovery in her first on-screen role, Melliti deservedly won Best Actress awards at Cannes and Lumières for her performance, with the film winning the 2025 Louis-Delluc Prize. Nominated for six César Awards, including Best Film, Director, Supporting Actress (Park), and Female Newcomer (Melliti). A Strand Releasing release.

Love Me Tender
Anna Cazenave Cambet, 2025, France, 133m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
After a seemingly friendly divorce from Laurent (Antoine Reinartz), writer Clémence (a wonderful Vicky Krieps) begins exploring her sexuality by serially dating women. When she tells Laurent about this new development, their relationship suddenly becomes fraught as he unexpectedly decides to withhold access to their 8-year-old child Paul (Viggo Ferreira-Redier). So begins a vicious multiyear legal saga over custody rights, pitting Clémence against not just her ex-husband, but an entire legal system slanted against women who don’t conform to traditional images of motherhood. Adapted from Constance Debré’s semi-autobiographical novel, Love Me Tender is anchored by a towering performance from Vicky Krieps (Corsage, NYFF60) as a passionate, caring mother fighting with all her power to maintain the most important relationship from her old life while defiantly embarking upon a new one.

Maigret and the Dead Lover / Maigret et le mort amoureux
Pascal Bonitzer, 2025, France/Belgium, 80m
French with English subtitles
North American Premiere
Well known for his frequent screenwriting collaborations with the late Jacques Rivette, writer-director Pascal Bonitzer (Auction, Rendez-Vous 2024) takes on one of France’s most-loved characters, the gruff but humane Inspector Jules Maigret. The latest performer to embody Georges Simenon’s iconic detective, signature pipe and all, the equally legendary Denis Podalydès of the Comédie-Française is engrossing as the methodical sleuth working his way through a particularly baffling case. In a series of interrogations with mysteriously uncooperative families and domestic staff, Maigret works to uncover the truth behind the murder of a former ambassador. Staying true to Simenon’s understated, quietly riveting prose, Bonitzer presents a masterful contemporary update of one of the great sleuths while capturing the character’s essence.

Meteors / Météors
Hubert Charuel, 2025, France, 108m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Lifelong friends Mika (Paul Kircher), Tony (Salif Cissé), and Dan (Idir Azougli, who earned a César Award nomination for Best Male Newcomer) have never escaped the confines of their bleak town in eastern France, and both their friendship and livelihoods are hitting a dead end. Trying to turn the tide as Dan descends deeper into chronic alcoholism and ill-conceived mischief, Mika pushes Tony, their better-off friend, to hire them at a nuclear waste storage facility. Training an eye on Saint-Dizier, his real-life hometown and site of his first short films, Hubert Charuel (Petit Paysan, Rendez-Vous 2018) and co-writer Claude Le Pape illuminate both the specific dynamics of fraught male friendships and eastern France’s controversial economic dependence on nuclear waste disposal. The imposing concrete blocks and storage facilities that dwarf Tony and Dan add an unexpected, surreal edge to this otherwise meticulously naturalistic study of rural masculinity in crisis.

The Money Maker / L’Affaire Bojarski
Jean-Paul Salomé, 2025, France/Belgium, 128m
French and Polish with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Based on a true story about the man dubbed the “Cézanne of counterfeit money,” The Money Maker meticulously recreates the decade-plus battle of wits between an ace forger and the French police force. On one side there’s Polish immigrant Jan Bojarski (Reda Kateb), who escaped to France during World War II and, unable to find financial backing for his numerous inventions, turned to meticulously counterfeiting paper currency. Representing the law is the relentless André Mattei (Bastien Bouillon, also the lead in this year’s Rendez-Vous selection At Work), whose vow to find the forger gradually takes on the dimensions of an epic quest. While taking a clear look at the prevailing xenophobia that Bojarski encountered, The Money Maker is also a pleasurably lush, gorgeous reconstruction of France during and after World War II.

Nino
Pauline Loquès, 2025, France, 97m
French with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Diagnosed with throat cancer on his 29th birthday, Nino (Théodore Pellerin, Lurker) must wait four nerve-wracking days and nights before his treatment can begin. Worried about burdening friends, family, and ex-girlfriends with the news, an aimless Nino keeps his diagnosis to himself and wanders Paris, becoming more awake to the world around him as the hours pass. In a debut feature film inspired by the premature death of a close relative, Pauline Loquès trains a sensitive eye on a young man at a moment of existential reckoning. The quietly magnetic Pellerin wanders through an of-the-moment portrait of Paris, seen here from a perspective outside the usual tourist precincts, encountering a wide variety of people along the way—embodied by a sterling ensemble cast that includes the legendary Jeanne Balibar as Nino’s mother, and a memorable cameo from Mathieu Amalric as a mysterious stranger. Winner of the Lumières Award for Best First Film. Nominated for three César Awards, including Best Supporting Actress (Balibar) and Male Newcomer (Pellerin).

Two Pianos / Deux pianos
Arnaud Desplechin, 2025, France, 115m
French and English with English subtitles
New York Premiere
Pianist Mathias (François Civil) returns home to Lyon after years away teaching and performing in Japan. He’s been summoned back to duet with his former teacher Elena (Charlotte Rampling) during her final concerts—a re-encounter with a demanding mentor that proves less daunting than Mathias’s experience of running into a charismatic but erratic ex, Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz). One of France’s biggest rising stars, Civil (who studied rigorously to perform Bach on-screen himself) is a worthy partner for the legendary, typically commanding Rampling. Psychologically charged homecomings and the unexpected reunions they can bring about—romantically charged and otherwise—are a recurring through line in the films of Arnaud Desplechin (Brother and Sister, Rendez-Vous 2023), thematic fodder that he revisits in typically boisterous form against the backdrop of a city he’s never filmed before. A Kino Lorber release.

The Wizard of the Kremlin / Le Mage du Kremlin
Olivier Assayas, 2025, France, 135m
English and Russian with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Published in 2022, diplomat Giuliano da Empoli’s The Wizard of the Kremlin is an insightful insider’s lightly fictionalized look at Vladimir Putin’s rise to power with the help of mysterious advisor Vladislav Surkov. In this adaptation, Olivier Assayas takes da Empoli’s political insights as the starting point for another of his signature meditations on globalization. While his 2010 miniseries Carlos showed how terrorism shaped geopolitics during the Cold War, here Assayas picks up the historical thread that followed. Showing the rise of Putin (Jude Law) from the viewpoint of fictionalized advisor Vadim Baranov (a mesmerizing, enigmatic Paul Dano), Assayas meticulously recreates ’90s Moscow. Beneath its dazzling surface is a strikingly personal meditation that, like the filmmaker’s autobiographical Something in the Air (NYFF50), considers the roles and responsibilities of the artist during times of intense political change.

Writing Life: Annie Ernaux Through the Eyes of High School Students / Écrire la vie – Annie Ernaux racontée par des lycéennes et des lycéens
Claire Simon, 2025, France, 90m
French with English subtitles
U.S. Premiere
Three years after Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize for decades of autofiction and journalism, Claire Simon (I Want to Talk About Duras, NYFF59) finds fresh new contexts for her work in this unorthodox documentary tribute. Rather than interviewing Ernaux herself, Simon travels to high schools across France, as well as French Guinea, where students grapple with 10 of her most important books, forming a winning companion piece to 2024’s Elementary, Simon’s portrait of a Paris elementary school. Speaking as frankly as the acclaimed author of Happening and Simple Passion, among other landmark texts, young people of all backgrounds connect Ernaux’s rigorous self-interrogation to their own experiences with parents, diasporic upbringings, and sexual taboos. Inside and outside of the classroom, these teenagers are open and winning before Simon’s experienced, compassionate eye.