Jacques Audi­ard cap­tures the poet­ry of urban life in the Paris, 13^th Dis­trict trailer

Most major met­ro­pol­i­tan areas have a neigh­bor­hood like the 13^th arrondisse­ment of Paris: dense­ly con­cen­trat­ed immi­grant pop­u­la­tion (in this case, Chi­nese and Viet­namese in what’s known as the Quarti­er Asi­a­tique), high-rise apart­ment blocks, mom-and-pop busi­ness­es with tight mar­gins. In urban enclaves like this, the essence of city life is felt most close­ly, in all its aspi­ra­tions and rein­ven­tion and crowd­ed isolation.

That’s the idea with Jacques Audi­ard​‘s lat­est film, the criss-cross­ing mur­al of striv­ing and strug­gle titled Paris, 13^th Dis­trict. Today brings the first trail­er for the Cannes com­pe­ti­tion selec­tion, which intro­duces the four char­ac­ters hap­haz­ard­ly thrown into one another’s lives by the pure chance that gov­erns the day-to-day in the bus­tle of a metro.

Tai­wanese emi­gré Emi­lie (Lucie Zhang) has a pret­ty good set­up, liv­ing rent-free in her grandmother’s vacant flat while ignor­ing the needs of her own fam­i­ly. She even­tu­al­ly devel­ops an attrac­tion to Black school­teacher Camille (Maki­ta Sam­ba), their frag­ile courtship intrud­ed on by law stu­dent Norah (Noémie Mer­lant) fol­low­ing a case of mis­tak­en iden­ti­ty with the cam­girl Amber Sweet (Jehn­ny Beth, singer-song­writer and one half of the rock band Sav­ages). The graph­ic nov­el anthol­o­gy ​‘Killing and Dying’ – in par­tic­u­lar the epony­mous short sto­ry ​‘Amber Sweet’ and ​‘Hawai­ian Get­away’ – pro­vid­ed the basis for this unusu­al­ly-struc­tured plot.

Our own Han­nah Strong was tak­en with the film at its Cannes pre­mière, find­ing its van­tage on the minu­ti­ae of ban­lieue-adja­cent cul­ture. ​“There’s a real sense of place with­in the film, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the apart­ments of Emi­lie and Norah, but also as they wan­der the neigh­bour­hood through malls and green spaces,” she wrote in her review. ​“It feels like we’re being giv­en a tour by locals, whose love for their city is only jad­ed by the bur­den of title. This apa­thet­ic insider’s view of Paris match­es its drift­ing occu­pants at the heart of the story…”

Filmed in black-and-white for max­i­mum soul­ful grit, told with the com­bi­na­tion of affec­tion and resent­ment all city-dwellers know as sec­ond nature, it’s a sig­nif­i­cant new entry in the canon of Paris-set cin­e­ma. For those of us who can’t just drop every­thing and whisk our­selves off to a street-lev­el French hol­i­day, it’s the next best thing.

Paris, 13^th Dis­trict comes to select cin­e­mas in the UK for pre­views on 14 Feb­ru­ary and releas­es wide­ly 18 March.