Filmmaker Amélie Bonnin wanted her feature debut to be personal, a passion project.

The direct0r 0f this year’s Cannes Film Fest opener, Leave One Day, had already tested the concept of a modern jukebox musical with her César-winning short “Bye Bye.”

But once she got to work expanding the premise — and looking for new tracks — she began to question her idea.

“I had originally chosen a male lead more out of habit than intention,” Bonnin explains. “I knew I wanted to take a different path. I wanted to bring a specific perspective — that of a mature woman, age 45, navigating work, motherhood, and desire. I needed to tell this story through my own lens.”

Bonnin reshaped her musical dramedy around a rising chef, played by French pop star Juliette Armanet, who returns to her rural hometown to confront family health crisis and unexpected pregnancy — just days before launching her namesake restaurant in Paris.

“I’ve always been drawn to visual storytelling, whether through typography, photography, or illustration,” she says. “Video only came later, at first as a way to film my own family members and to capture their stories.”

She started her new path more than a decade ago. While in Canada studying graphic design, Bonnin dipped into a screening of Raymond Depardon’s small-town doc “Modern Life,” simply hoping for a few familiar sights. Instead, she found a cinematic north star. “I cried through the whole film,” she says.

Overwhelmed and homesick, Bonnin looked for music to match the mood. That moment never faded, directly inspiring her own work.

“I like to create a soundtrack for my life,” says Bonnin. “We all do — we play music on a road trip, before a date, or alone with our headphones after a breakup.

With Leave One Day, I wanted to bring that feeling to the screen. Not through big musical numbers, but with songs that follow real-life moments. It’s playful, and it breaks from traditional storytelling, but it’s universal, because we’ve all been there.”

She had her performers belt out each tune live on set, emphasizing the process’ imperfection and spontaneity.

“I can’t work in the abstract,” she explains. “Dubbing was never an option. Every emotion, every inflection had to come from the moment. Capturing what was truly happening in front of us was far more satisfying for the cast and crew — and knowing it’s real makes it more powerful for viewers. The joy is immediate.”

“The magic lies in that moment of collective invention — bringing an image to life that couldn’t exist any other way,” Bonnin adds, citing Michel Gondry as key influence. “It’s about building something together, and then watching it unfold in real time.”

Bonnin wrote the film for pop star Juliette Armanet — a popular French chanteuse who made her acting debut in Bonnin’s previous short. This time, the star would never step off-screen, all while navigating the joyful chaos of a film set that cherished imperfection.

“Juliette is used to controlling her singing career down to the millimeter, to singing everything perfectly,” Bonnin notes. “So I constantly made her perform in a very different way. She wasn’t alone in a booth with headphones just thinking about the song — she had to think about how she interacted with her partner, all while skating backward, all while countless people buzzed around her. There was too much to take into account, and that suited our needs perfectly.”

“At first, I thought, I’ve already made a film with songs — so I can’t do that again,” she says. “But now I think, why not? Music lets me step just outside of reality and access a different kind of storytelling. That touch of fantasy brings greater emotion as well.”