THE WILD BOYS

Bertrand Mandico’s THE WILD BOYS draws on a lineage of French avant-garde cinema, combining elements of surrealism, erotic fantasy, and theatrical artifice into a deliberately constructed visual world. Set within a punitive journey at sea, the film quickly moves away from narrative convention, instead foregrounding texture, gesture, and transformation as its primary concerns.

Mandico works extensively with practical effects, in-camera techniques, and analogue processes, creating imagery that feels handmade and unstable. Double exposures, painted backdrops, and stylised lighting recall earlier experimental traditions, while the casting of female performers in male roles introduces a further layer of ambiguity around identity and embodiment.

What emerges is a film defined less by plot than by sensation and form. Its shifting environments and physical transformations position it within a specifically French tradition that prioritises visual invention and transgression. I’ve chosen to present it here at FOMO because THE WILD BOYS offers an encounter with filmmaking that resists realism in favour of something more tactile, confrontational, and formally expressive.