In this Cannes Critics’ Week Grand Prize winner, an enigmatic young man yearns to belong with his disabled besties – but he’s not quite like them.

Simon, aged 21, falls in with a group of disabled youngsters whose care centre’s mountain excursion is disrupted by bad weather. He quickly befriends the wily Pehuen and catches the flirtatious eye of Colo. When they get back on the bus, so does Simon; he’s found his people. But when his exasperated mother shows up at the institution, she insists Simon doesn’t have an intellectual disability. Is she right? And if so, why does he seem to thrive there, but not with his family or in the wider world?

In his startlingly original debut feature, Argentinian director Federico Luis pays homage to Luis Buñuel’s 1965 film Simon of the Desert (MIFF 2000), in which a saintly ascetic decides to test his faith by living on top of a pillar. In Luis’s version, the alienating world that Simon is deliberately refusing is less clear. An intimate handheld camera closely follows Lorenzo Ferro’s extraordinary, physically committed lead performance, while the story as a whole resists the temptation of the usual coming-of-age clichés, instead revelling in the ambiguity and complexity of growing up.

“A rambunctious peek into a cloistered world … Captures the exuberance and challenges of adolescence without reducing its characters to their disabilities.” – Screen Anarchy