Margaux Dieudonné
2025
France
French
fiction
drama | coming of age | lgbtqia+ | romance
23 minutes
Mondina Films | co-produced by Need Production
Summer in rural France. Fourteen-year-old Marion pushes her brother and his friends to confront a young group of nomadic travelers who have just settled on the outskirts of their village. But when she meets Wendy, 15, an unexpected connection unsettles her, challenging her perceptions and stirring emotions she struggles to understand.
After a childhood spent roaming the fields of her rural hometown while inventing stories, Margaux Dieudonné made a wish at 18—to become a filmmaker, because she wanted to bring her stories to life through images. She joined the Ciné-Sup preparatory program in Nantes before entering the Screenwriting department at La Fémis in Paris at the age of 20.
During her time at school, Margaux explored her creative world, realizing that her stories often revolved around young girls who both desire and resist their own longing. Her scripts inevitably unfold in the landscapes of her childhood, where she seeks to harness their full narrative potential.
Alongside the development of her short film, Margaux also co-writes short and feature-length films, some of which have already received festival awards, such as Dans la tête un orage (A Storm Inside) by Clément Pérot, selected for the Quinzaine des Cinéastes (Director's Forthnight) at Cannes in 2023.
Margaux is currently developing two feature films, further exploring the themes of desire and violence that shape her storytelling.
ACROSS FIELDS, a lesbian western told from a teenage perspective, is rooted in a personal memory from the director’s childhood. Each summer in her village, the arrival of Traveller families was met with collective unease and perceived as a threatening intrusion. That ingrained fear and suspicion—reflective of broader societal attitudes towards the Traveller community—became the starting point for a film that seeks to interrogate prejudice from within the realm of desire.
At the heart of the story is Marion, a 14-year-old girl whose attraction to Wendy, a young Romani girl, unsettles her. Set under the scorching sun of the Vosges and punctuated by motorbikes and bumper cars, ACROSS FIELDS traces the confusing path of a desire that doesn’t yet have a place to exist.
Marion may not be able to overcome her fear by the end of the story, but her encounter with Wendy leaves a mark—an exchange, a rupture, a moment of doubt. For Margaux Dieudonné, it is precisely these uncomfortable, painful, and sometimes messy encounters that hold the potential to shift perception and open the door to change.
ACROSS FIELDS is a rural summer tale that offers a sensitive look at the tensions of adolescence —rejection, fear of the other, but also the awakening of desire and doubt. Through Marion’s perspective, the film explores how certain prejudices take root, and how they can be shaken by an unexpected encounter. Without seeking to excuse or condemn, ACROSS FIELDS faces reality head-on, with a disarming sincerity about the contradictions of a budding desire caught between attraction and rejection.
