Presented at the Critics’ Week of the Cannes Film Festival 2026, Oil in the Arteries, Pierre Le Gall’s debut feature, hits the mark with its gay love story in the world of truckers.
Here’s a film with some horsepower. After the lovely journey of Les Belles Cicatrices, his animated short film nominated this year for the César Awards, Pierre Le Gall presented at the Cannes Critics Week his first feature, Oil in the Arteries, a gay romance placed in a world rarely explored in cinema: Étienne, a French truck driver, meets Bartosz, a Polish colleague…
The film opens with a doubt about its subject, with the encounter between the two men in a woodland bordering a rest area, a cruising zone where the police intervene. “This cruising scene was essential because I wanted to convey the impression that the film would head toward the subject of homophobia,” explains Pierre Le Gall when we meet him on the terrace of a beach bar on the Croisette. I drew inspiration from The Wounded Man, by Chéreau, with seedy locations serving as nocturnal theatres. I knew what the audience would expect, and I wanted to defuse that to surprise them.
Kissing in a Cab Is Hard
There is no question of homophobia here. Taking the audience’s reflex toward this often-treated angle and turning it on its head, Oil in the Arteries simply dives into the nascent love between its two protagonists, not hindered by social prohibitions or their own internalized hatred. From there, the biggest obstacle weighing on their relationship is their work, exhausting, and sending them onto roads that do not always cross. “It’s a film about love and time, two themes that fascinate me in cinema,” says Pierre Le Gall. When you spend your life working, even when you do jobs you’re passionate about, how much time do we have left to offer to the people we love?”
