I’ll Be Gone in June

I’ll Be Gone in June begins with a view from an airplane window, the New Mexico desert appearing less like a welcoming landscape than the exposed surface of another planet. For sixteen-year-old German exchange student Franny, played with remarkable emotional precision by Naomi Cosma, this scorched immensity represents both the America she has imagined and the one she is about to discover: seductive, unknowable and far less free than its mythology promises. Arriving in Las Cruces for the 2001–2002 school year, she expects cultural adventure and perhaps the exhilarating reinvention that travel seems to offer at that age. Instead, she encounters conservative households, wary classmates, quietly constricted futures and, only weeks after her arrival, the collective trauma of September 11. Drawing partly upon her own experience as an exchange student, writer-director Katharina Rivilis transforms this material into something more elusive than an autobiographical chronicle. Her accomplished first feature is at once a coming-of-age film, a fractured video diary and a portrait of a nation retreating into fear just as its young European observer is attempting to enter it.

The film’s most perceptive decision is to reverse a familiar high-school-movie stereotype. Here, the foreign exchange student is neither an exotic accessory nor the target of an extended joke; she is the consciousness through which American life is examined. Franny is observant rather than naïve, and Naomi Cosma allows curiosity, amusement and distrust to pass across her face without explanatory dialogue. Having grown up in eastern Germany in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall, she possesses her own complicated relationship with nationalism and historical guilt, making the casual “Nazi girl” insults directed at her more than routine adolescent cruelty. They reveal how quickly identity can be reduced to inherited history. Her initial host parents, Tony Garcia and Eve Garcia, welcome her with a hospitality that gradually reveals its limits: their Christianity expects conformity, their interest in cultural exchange evaporates whenever difference becomes inconvenient, and even speaking German is treated as vaguely suspicious. The details are often more unsettling than any dramatic confrontation, particularly when the adults leave Franny and the other children waiting in a car while they gamble inside a casino. Such incidents give the film the discomfort of remembered experience—moments that may have seemed merely strange to a teenager but acquire a more troubling meaning when revisited by an adult filmmaker.

September 11 does not function as a conventional plot mechanism so much as a pressure change felt in every room. One of the film’s most effective sequences moves across a classroom of stunned students while an inadequate announcement offers the institutional language of “thoughts and prayers.” Immediately afterward, the Pledge of Allegiance takes on an almost ceremonial severity, especially from Franny’s perspective as the one student who cannot instinctively participate in this display of national solidarity. Later, her host father teaches her to fire a gun in case terrorists arrive at the family home, a scene at once absurd, frightening and revealing of how distant catastrophe can be domesticated into private paranoia. In another classroom discussion, teenagers debate military retaliation with a spontaneous mixture of vengeance, uncertainty, boredom and unexpected political intelligence. Because Katharina Rivilis encouraged her largely non-professional young cast to improvise, these conversations feel genuinely unstable; the students do not speak as mouthpieces arranged around a thesis but as adolescents trying to understand an event that the adults around them barely comprehend. The film is especially incisive when it shows patriotism hardening into suspicion, while border patrols and the nearby wall expose how differently safety is distributed in this corner of the United States.

Yet I’ll Be Gone in June is not solely a political memory piece, and its generosity lies in permitting teenage life to continue amid historical catastrophe. Franny forms a friendship with Sam, played by Bianca Dumais, whose reputation as a promiscuous troublemaker appears to say more about the town’s policing of young women than about her actual behaviour. Fellow German student Ida, portrayed by Rebecca Schulz, offers another possible response to displacement: a steadier, less rebellious form of adaptation. Around them, parties, swimming pools, unsuccessful attempts to persuade an adult to buy beer and long periods of apparently aimless hanging out restore a social texture increasingly absent from contemporary films about adolescence. These teenagers meet without arranging every encounter through a screen; they become close through proximity, boredom and repetition. The looseness is evocative, although it is also the source of the film’s principal weakness. Characters mention college, abuse, money and the limited futures available to them, but Katharina Rivilis sometimes moves away just as these implications become dramatically compelling. Her episodic structure accurately reproduces the partial knowledge of adolescence, yet it can also leave potentially rich lives suspended at the edge of Franny’s memory.

The more conventional element is Franny’s attraction to Elliott, played by David Flores, a melancholic local musician whose alleged drug use and generally disreputable aura make him irresistible to someone testing the boundaries of her temporary freedom. He sings in a band and works at a drive-in restaurant on roller skates, an anecdotal combination so perfectly specific that it could only have emerged from memory or excellent invention. Their romance is tender, sensual and eventually bruising, but the film becomes less distinctive when it surrenders too fully to his familiar mystique as the wounded, unavailable boy. David Flores supplies the necessary reserve, although his performance cannot quite match the restless range of Naomi Cosma, who makes Franny funny, stubborn, vulnerable and self-aware—sometimes within the same look. What matters most is not whether Elliott deserves her devotion but how decisively she pours herself into an experience she knows has an expiration date. The title has already told us that she will leave in June; consequently, every friendship and romantic promise carries the melancholy of a future memory. Her heartbreak is not simply the discovery that a boy is unreliable, but the realization that transformation offers no guarantee of belonging.

Visually, the film finds its strongest language whenever words become insufficient. Cinematographer Giulia Schelhas turns Las Cruces into an emotional landscape of burning oranges, nocturnal blues and enormous skies, capturing the region with fascination while resisting picture-postcard exoticism. The contrast between these composed digital images and Franny’s rough camcorder footage is particularly expressive. The former creates the sensuous mythology of experience; the latter records its awkward, accidental reality. Together, they suggest that memory is neither objective nor entirely invented, but assembled from incompatible textures. The extraordinary excursion to White Sands provides the film’s defining image: Franny and Elliott are swallowed by a storm, separated inside a pale, almost abstract haze as she reaches for a connection that the landscape appears determined to erase. It is romantic and ominous at once, a physical expression of two lonely teenagers who can recognize each other without necessarily being able to save one another. The musical choices likewise escape strict period reconstruction, drawing upon artists such as Nina Simone, Polly Jean Harvey and Chavela Vargas to create a remembered 2001 rather than a museum replica of it.

The involvement of producer Wim Wenders is unsurprising, because the film shares his fascination with America as both territory and projection: a place Europeans can traverse without ever completely deciphering. Nevertheless, Katharina Rivilis possesses a viewpoint of her own, particularly in the way she films adolescent bodies with affection and curiosity without turning them into sexual spectacle. Her debut occasionally confuses fragmentation with depth, and its latter passages lose momentum when the romance displaces the sharper cultural observations. Even so, its imperfections feel inseparable from its sincerity. I’ll Be Gone in June understands that adolescence is rarely experienced as a well-shaped narrative; it is accumulated from rooms one no longer enters, people who disappear without closure and events whose significance becomes clear only years later. Through Franny, the film witnesses an America wounded into defensiveness while preserving the possibility that personal openness might resist political fear. Beautifully photographed, politically alert and anchored by the magnetic Naomi Cosma, it announces Katharina Rivilis as a filmmaker capable of finding historical meaning in the unstable intimacy of memory.

I’ll Be Gone in June
Written and directed by Katharina Rivilis
Produced by Léa Germain, Wim Wenders, Clemens Köstlin, Katharina Rivilis, Olga Lamontanara, Simon Jaquemet, Andrea Kühnel, Vincent Savino
Starring: Naomi Cosma, Logan Sage, Bianca Dumais, David Flores, Elijah De Billie, Mia Ayon, Marco Silva
Cinematography: Giulia Schelhas
Edited by Aurora Franco Vögeli
Music by Steve Binetti, Eliane Bründler
Production companies: Road Movies Filmproduktion, Wolfskind Films, Film Science, 8horses
Distributed by: NC
Release dates: NC
Running time: 120 minutes

Seen on 8 September 2026 at the Deauville International Center