Sightlines · reception

How Love Letters was received

2025 · Alice Douard · Love Letters on Sightlines

The arc

It opened Cannes Critics' Week in May 2025 to warm reviews (a rare 100% on Rotten Tomatoes) and has spent the year since as a festival-circuit favorite, picking up NewFest's Grand Jury Prize on its way to word-of-mouth queer-canon status.

Its footprint

The premise is the hook everyone leads with — a soon-to-be mother gathering written testimonies that she loves her own child — and it's made the film a reference point in conversations about how French law treated same-sex parents after the 2013 marriage act.

Where it stands

Still brand new, but already a small Letterboxd darling in queer-cinema circles — the 'gentle, gorgeous debut you should catch before everyone else does' slot.

Did you know? Douard lived this story: she went through the same adoption process after her wife gave birth to their daughter in 2018, and she wrote the lead role of Céline specifically for Ella Rumpf — casting opposite her Monia Chokri, an acclaimed director in her own right.

Named by the director

• Love Songs (Les Chansons d'amour) (2007) — Douard named Honoré's musical romance as one of the important films behind her own.
• Christophe Honoré — She cited Honoré's films in general as a formative influence on Love Letters.
• The L Word (2004) — Douard said it was a series, not a film, that truly 'awakened and helped' her — The L Word.