And Their Children After Them

And Their Children After Them (Leurs enfants après eux, 2024) is a French coming-of-age drama you can watch online on iFILM. Eastern France, a burned-out steel valley, the heavy summer of 1992. Two teenage cousins steal a canoe and paddle to the far side of a lake, chasing whatever waits on the other shore.

Brothers Zoran and Ludovic Boukherma adapted the film from Nicolas Mathieu's novel, which won the Prix Goncourt. Paul Kircher leads as the restless Anthony; Gilles Lellouche and Ludivine Sagnier play the parents whose factories closed and whose anger never did. Across a few summers the story tracks a first crush, the hard wall between a worker's son and a manager's daughter, a stolen motorbike, and the slow ache of a town nobody seems able to leave.

This is not soft nostalgia. It is an honest look at how the place you are born decides the life you get. At 146 minutes it takes its time, thick with hot asphalt and warm beer by the water — the kind of European social drama that earns its quiet. Stream And Their Children After Them (2024) online on iFILM.