Name: Love Letters
Director: Alice Douard
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Released: 2026-06-19T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 97 min
Cast: Ella Rumpf, Monia Chokri, Noémie Lvovsky, Félix Kysyl, Anne Le Ny

A child is on the way, and only one of her two mothers will count as a parent the moment she arrives. That is the quiet, infuriating engine of Love Letters, the first feature from French writer-director Alice Douard. Céline is married to Nadia. Nadia is pregnant. And Céline, in the eyes of the state, is no one to the daughter they planned together — not a guardian, not a parent, nothing — until she completes a formal adoption of her own child.

The film’s French title, Des preuves d’amour, says it without flinching: proofs of love. To become a legal parent, Céline has to assemble a dossier — letters, statements, endorsements — documenting the authenticity of a bond no father in a straight marriage is ever asked to evidence. The English title softens that demand into something tender. The movie never lets you forget it is, first, a filing requirement, complete with deadlines and a caseworker.

Ella Rumpf plays Céline with a held-in watchfulness that turns waiting itself into the film’s main action. Rumpf, who broke through in Julia Ducournau’s Raw and has become one of European cinema’s most controlled young leads, keeps the performance low and exact, letting the absurdity of the situation register in a tightened jaw rather than a speech. Opposite her, the Québécois filmmaker and actor Monia Chokri gives Nadia the easy authority of the woman whose body the law happens to recognize. The casting is the argument: two women at the same kitchen table, one visible to the state and one not.

Douard wrote the film out of her own life — she adopted her wife’s biological child — and the specificity shows on screen. This is not an issue movie assembled from headlines but a procedural built from forms someone actually filled out, with the particular dread of a home visit and the particular humiliation of being interviewed about whether you love the family you already have. She directs with restraint, trusting the indignities of the process to do the editorializing, and the result is the kind of debut that announces a filmmaker more interested in precision than in scale.

For all the bureaucratic cruelty in its premise, the film is not a misery drama. Douard pitches it as a comedy of exasperation as much as a domestic study, and the register matters: the laughs come from the gap between the enormity of what Céline feels and the banality of the forms asking her to quantify it. Chokri and Rumpf play that gap with a lived-in ease, two people who can finish each other’s bureaucratic sentences, which makes the moments the system wedges between them land all the harder.

What gives Love Letters its charge is an asymmetry it documents without underlining. Céline must submit to checks on her health, her home and her fitness to raise a daughter she is already raising — scrutiny applied to her precisely because she is the second mother in a marriage the country had only recently agreed to recognize. The sharpest thread asks her to obtain a written endorsement from her own mother, played by Noémie Lvovsky, which turns a private, complicated family relationship into a document for a file. The proof the title demands turns out to be other people’s words, and the film is acute about what it costs to go asking for them.

That discipline is also the film’s ceiling. Love Letters stays deliberately small — domestic, interior, scaled to one couple’s waiting room — and anyone wanting it to widen into a fuller reckoning with French family law, or with how those rules have and haven’t shifted since, will find it incurious about the politics outside Céline’s apartment. It dramatizes an injustice without much arguing about how to undo it, and its gentleness occasionally rounds off edges the situation has every right to keep sharp. This is a chamber piece, not a polemic, and it never pretends otherwise.

Running 97 minutes, the film plays as a drama in a comic key, anchored by Rumpf and Chokri and rounded out by Lvovsky, Félix Kysyl and Anne Le Ny. It reached audiences first on the festival circuit, where it premiered in Critics’ Week at Cannes and went on to take a special mention at the Zurich Film Festival and an audience award at Filmfest Hamburg — the warm reception a debut earns when it has no marquee stars to coast on and wins the room on its merits instead.

Love Letters opened in French cinemas last autumn and is now continuing its international rollout. The Spanish distributor La Aventura releases it across Spain on 19 June, under the title 15 pruebas de amor. Most audiences elsewhere will meet it through festivals for the moment. A film this specific about one country’s paperwork turns out to travel well, because the question underneath it — who is made to prove they are a parent, and who never has to — does not stop at the border.