Love is known to take you by surprise. So can its portrayal on screen. Pierre Le Gall showcases it deftly in an unusual but heartwarming sequence in his France-Poland co-production, Flesh and Fuel. Etienne and Bartosz, two itinerant truck drivers, who are more than just friends, are approaching each other from either side of a bridge, heading in different directions on work. As they count the gantries to the moment they’d cross each other, their thrill of being able to make eye contact and exchange new year wishes reaches out to the audience. It’s all about an uplifting love that bridges the distance between the two driver’s seats. The joy of reuniting couldn’t have felt more boundless.

But the passion is rooted in loneliness of the long distance truck drivers who are always on the move, driving the nation’s economy but stuck and stymied in their personal lives. A world built on long distance ties and being a family in absentia. It’s a reality rarely seen on screen. There is the economic necessity of holding on to a job that is about constantly ferrying goods and living on the road rather than dropping anchor at home. The urgency to transport exotic lychees to the consumers can often mess up Christmas planned with the family. Love can hardly come easy and a relationship often is all about furtive and fickle intimacies struck in the parking lots and quickly forgotten on the road ahead. French truck driver Etienne is navigating a similar terrain of fleeting brief encounters till the Polish colleague Bartosz sparks something that feels like true love.

The film premiered in the Critics’ Week sidebar’s Special Screening segment and won the Special Queer Palm Revelation 2026 award at the Cannes Film Festival. The script, written by Le Gall with Camille Perton and Martin Drouot, has emotional candour and integrity to it and the two leads are dealt with a lot of warmth and compassion, as well as respect and dignity for how they keep the wheels of the nation running. It could have a lot to do with the fact that Le Gall himself spent a lot of time on the road with a trucker to get a sense of his reality. The industrial landscape, the prosaic world of godowns, warehouses and transportation zones, expressways and parking lots and even the interiors of trucks are rendered adroitly by production designer Anne-Sophie Delseries, who is also behind the look of another Cannes film this year, Marion Le Coroller’s Sanguine. This assembly-line yet humane world, dominated by men and driven by bro-codes, friendships and solidarities as much as competitiveness is captured in all its jaggedness as well as richness by Antoine Cormier’s handheld camera. It follows Etienne like his own shadow amid constant scenes of loading and unloading of goods to give a sense of his unending slog of life, occasionally punctured by some welcome bursts of romance.

Le Gall makes things experiential rather than explicatory. More than anything else it’s the steady, tender gaze of an otherwise muscular Alexis Manenti as Etienne that occupies the core of the film. It is narrated entirely from his point of view. His eyes say it all and make the depth of his feelings for Bartosz (Julian Swiezewski) palpable for the audience. Etienne is the giver in the equation, the one who has gravitas, is grounded and contained; Bartosz, the bohemian livewire, is the receiver and their little gestures and body language spell it all out than words, right down to the arduousness of love having to keep pace with their individual lives. Time is a crucial element in the film. Neither of them has enough of it because of the demands of their job. But Le Gall believes in the happy and the hopeful. In his books, romance has to find a way. No wonder Flesh and Fuel could well be one of the most feel-good films at Cannes this year.