– CANNES 2026: Aina Clotet directs a comedy-drama centred on a woman who, as the title suggests, wants to feel fully alive after overcoming a serious illness
Marc Soler and Aina Clotet in Alive
A couple of years ago, the series This Is Not Sweden won, among other awards, the prize for Best Performance at Canneseries, the Prix Europa for Best European Television Drama and the Ondas Award for Best Comedy Series. A grand directorial debut for the Catalan actress Aina Clotet, who is now also premiering her first feature film behind the camera in style at the Critics’ Week of the 79th Cannes Film Festival: Alive, originally titled Oh Nora!, after the name of an improvised song that appears in the film.
It is precisely this Nora, played by Clotet herself (who also co-writes the film alongside her regular collaborator, Valentina Viso), who is the central character. Nora is a woman in her early forties who has just beaten cancer. Marked physically and emotionally by the experience, she feels an overwhelming urge to live life to the fullest. The self-demanding Nora suddenly finds herself torn between the stability of her long-term relationship with Tom (Naby Dakhli) and the arrival of Max (Marc Soler), a man in his twenties who rekindles her desire and sense of freedom.
Alive becomes a portrait of a woman ablaze, racing to seize every second of life in the face of the threat of losing it. Along the way, all sorts of things happen to her: she experiences joy, sexual liberation, but she also makes some painful mistakes that render her deeply human, and at the same time, provoking a certain dislike and bewilderment in the viewer, who ends up loving and hating Nora in equal measure.
In her eagerness to live life to the fullest, she comes across as clumsy, rash, erratic, complicated, outspoken and impulsive — reminiscent of Renate Reinsve’s character in The Worst Person in the World. Clotet’s film operates in a similar register of rebellious, label-defying humour, set in the near future where water is scarce and flies are a constant nuisance.
To this, as well as one of the biggest sexual anticlimaxes seen on screen in a long time, Clotet adds bold narrative choices such as a fearless depiction of the stark consequences of an illness; the rediscovery of desire (and the feeling of being desired); the uncontrollable fear of death; and a feverish passion between a woman and a man half her age. This bold, daring, somewhat chaotic – much like its protagonist – and uneven film Alive tackles a host of themes and ambitions. Yet Aina Clotet fails to surprise or entertain as much as she did with her series This Is Not Sweden, the sequel to which she will shoot later this year.
Alive is produced by the Spanish companies Ikiru Films and Funicular Films. International sales are handled by Loco Films.
(Translated from Spanish)
