Festivals - Biarritz Film Festival 2025: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, A Jury President Who Embodies the Future of Cinema

By Mulder, 06 may 2025

The Biarritz Film Festival – nouvelles vagues has, since its inception, positioned itself as more than a mere showcase of rising talent; it is a festival rooted in conviction, in vision, and in the bold desire to highlight a cinema that reflects youth in all its complexity. This year, the appointment of Norwegian filmmaker and screenwriter Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel as the President of the Jury is not just a distinguished honor — it is a bold, almost poetic, affirmation of the festival’s core mission. At just 34 years old, Tøndel has already carved out a singular place in the European arthouse landscape, not by leaning into the gravitas of his lineage — being the grandson of iconic figures Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman — but by actively forging his own cinematic voice. It’s a voice that does not shout to be heard, but rather murmurs with uncanny precision, attentive to the micro-dramas of everyday life, to silences as potent as any monologue, to the private dissonances that reveal the contradictions of modern society. His work is not about replicating a legacy; it is about redefining one.

The selection of Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel could not have come at a more appropriate moment. His debut feature film, The Communion (La Convocation, 2024), was nothing short of a revelation. Awarded the prestigious Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and later honored with the FIPRESCI Discovery Prize at the European Film Awards, the film captured the attention of critics and cinephiles alike with its understated brilliance. Set around a seemingly small event — an incident between two children at school — the film becomes a deeply unsettling and elegant meditation on the adult world, filtered through the gaze of innocence. In this narrative choice lies the genius of Tøndel: his cinema is not about spectacle, but about perception, and he transforms even the simplest stories into vessels of psychological tension and philosophical questioning. The premise may seem modest, but the emotional stakes are profound, making it a perfect echo of the themes at the heart of NOUVELLES VAGUES — the questioning spirit, the emotional turbulence, and the transformative energy of youth.

Tøndel’s entire body of work, including his short films such as Bird Hearts, is laced with an almost tactile understanding of youth: its brutal honesty, its longing, its ambivalence. Whether through the strained interactions of siblings, the awkwardness of young adults navigating love and belonging, or the dissonance between personal desire and social expectation, he captures the unspoken with breathtaking sensitivity. There is a quiet, persistent empathy in his direction that resists moralism, allowing ambiguity to breathe — an approach that aligns beautifully with the ethos of a festival that seeks not to define youth, but to let it speak in all its messy, glorious contradiction. For emerging filmmakers presenting their work in Biarritz this year, knowing that Tøndel will be the one watching — someone who sees vulnerability not as a flaw, but as narrative fuel — is both reassuring and inspiring.

Beyond his films, Tøndel is someone who lives and breathes cinema with the depth of someone who grew up around the medium, but the detachment of someone unafraid to challenge its dogmas. In past interviews, he has spoken candidly about the pressures of legacy, and how he consciously chose to study directing at the Westerdals School of Arts in Oslo, rather than following more traditional or high-profile film school paths. This decision alone speaks volumes about his commitment to craft over image, to substance over superficiality. At a time when film festivals are too often caught between celebrating celebrity and promoting true artistic innovation, Tøndel’s appointment represents a conscious alignment with the latter. His cinematic worldview — that art should feel before it teaches, that stories should be lived in before they are understood — is the kind of perspective that young filmmakers crave and the industry desperately needs.

The symbolic weight of his presidency at Biarritz also lies in the subtle, but significant shift it signals: that we are now looking to a generation of filmmakers who are not just products of past greatness, but voices shaping a new aesthetic, a new emotional language. As the festival continues to champion a cinema that dares to speak to and from the youth — not in slogans, but in stories — Tøndel’s leadership will be instrumental in setting the tone. He brings with him a Nordic rigor in composition and pacing, but also a universal emotional fluency that transcends geography. With The Communion, he showed how childhood can be a mirror to adult failings, how quiet moments can carry the weight of societal reckoning. Imagine, then, what kind of conversations, what kind of cinematic discoveries might emerge under his presidency, guided not by ego, but by a deep reverence for the power of film to provoke, to heal, and to awaken.

Ultimately, what makes Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel such a compelling choice as jury president is not just his skill as a filmmaker, nor his growing list of accolades, but the kind of filmmaker he is becoming — one who listens more than he asserts, who trusts the viewer, and who believes that the smallest stories can hold the deepest truths. In a world saturated with spectacle and noise, his cinema offers a rare pause, an invitation to feel more deeply and to see more clearly. This is precisely what the Biarritz Film Festival – nouvelles vagues has always aspired to be: not just a festival about youth, but one that believes in youth as a force — chaotic, questioning, luminous — capable of transforming cinema from within. With Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel at the helm, that vision feels not only possible but inevitable.

(Source : press release)