Cannes 2025: Exclusive CARAVAN Clip Premiere

After more than three decades, a majority Czech feature film returns to the official selection of the Cannes Film Festival. Caravan, a feature debut by Zuzana Kirchnerová, will world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section, a fitting home for this emotionally textured, visually lyrical film that reframes motherhood, freedom, and disability.

Caravan follows Ester (Aňa Geislerová) and her intellectually disabled son David on a journey across the Italian countryside. But this is no feel-good road movie. As Ester pushes against the limits of her long-assumed identity as a caregiver, Caravan addresses the internal exile of women trapped between love and obligation, survival and selfhood.

Shot in Emilia-Romagna and Calabria, with additional days in South Moravia, Caravan draws visual inspiration from the poetic realism of the Dardenne brothers and Alice Rohrwacher, while incorporating atmospheric tones à la Mati Diop’s Atlantics. Slovak cinematographer Denisa Buranová captures light and mood in a way that reflects the sensory perspective of David, played by non-professional actor David Vodstrčil, whose casting followed a year-long search across over 120 candidates with disabilities.

At the heart of the film lies a radical question: What if the narrative of motherhood was told not as sacrifice or sainthood, but as a search for freedom? Kirchnerová’s screenplay, co-written with Tomáš Bojar and Kristina Májová, emerged from the TorinoFilmLab, garnering the Film Foundation Award for Best Unrealized Script and securing a coveted spot in the L’Atelier de la Cinéfondation. 

"Caravan is not autobiographical,” Kirchnerová has said, though her own experience as the mother of a child with Down syndrome and autism clearly informs the film’s emotional authenticity. “But it is deeply personal. It’s about reclaiming life beyond definitions. Beyond roles.”

Official synopsis: "Overwhelmed by motherhood, Ester steals a caravan and flees to southern Italy with her son David with an intellectual disability. They meet a young drifter whose open heart transforms their makeshift family into something freer, lighter, and full of unexpected hope."