Sunday, November 9, 2025, in Manhattan, Emily Ratajkowski, 34 years old, and Romain Gavras, 44 years old, were photographed embracing in the street. These images, shared by people and lifestyle outlets, fuel the hypothesis of a public, yet unofficial, relationship. This serves as an excuse to revisit Gavras’s work, from Kourtrajmé to Athena, and understand what his images reveal about an author shaped by urban energy.
In New York, a street scene like a long take
In the milky light of a November Sunday, Manhattan stretches its arteries. Taxis glide by, a hot dog vendor adjusts his cap, and at the corner of an avenue, a couple stops. She, in a caramel coat, with a precise demeanor, a smile on the edge. He, with a massive silhouette, a blue t-shirt hidden under a dark overcoat, walking with the stride of a great stroller. We see them getting closer, holding each other, kissing. The moment seems caught on the fly, yet everything breathes composition. Emily Ratajkowski, 34 years old, model and author, and Romain Gavras, 44 years old, French director, walk through New York as if entering a film scene. Paparazzi photos in New York are already circulating, multiplied by sites and networks. The city buzzes, as do the rumors.
The vision impresses because it surprises in the open air. The gestures are tender, assumed. One might read in them the desire to live a story without hiding. There is no official statement, no press release, nothing but these images and their power. Thus, we dare to use the conditional. The director of Athena and the author of My Body walk together. The rest belongs to the intimate, and that’s just fine.
A filmmaker shaped by urban energy
Romain Gavras grew up in the wake of a significant name, but he carved out his own space with striking images and fast-paced narratives. Co-founder of the Kourtrajmé collective (school and collective) in the mid-nineties with Kim Chapiron, he first found his rhythm in music videos, a field of experimentation where music fuses with the frame. His camera loves the bold angle, crowds in tension, faces on the verge of explosion. He has a way of filming the city as a living material: blocks, ramps, facades, everything becomes a surface of friction.
Violence, in Gavras’s work, is never documentary. It is expressed through an assumed stylization, akin to a ballet. Bodies seem choreographed, chases resemble dances. One thinks of the frantic races in his images for Justice. One also imagines the red breath of M.I.A.. Moreover, the helmeted silhouettes and smoke bombs suggest a world close to ignition. The gesture is political by form, more than by discourse: it captures the moment when society creaks, when order wavers, when youth seeks a place.
The feature film Our Day Will Come laid a first stone, a hallucinatory tale of drifting outcasts. The World Is Yours later managed to blend pop fantasy and bittersweet satire. It’s as if the author enjoyed sabotaging the codes of the thriller with comedic escapades. With Athena (Netflix), in 2022, Gavras pushed ambition to its apex: wide angles, rapid-fire long takes, a palette of embers. Critics were divided, a sign that a work touches a nerve: it was seen as both plastic virtuosity and political ellipsis, a formal punch and a sometimes too clear parable. What remains is the sensation of a cinema that embraces excess to speak of the era, even if it means shaking it up.
Biography and legacies: lineages and uniqueness
The name Gavras is not a coincidence. The surname refers to Costa-Gavras, his father and a major filmmaker, who brought politics into storytelling with a narrative clarity that became a model. Romain chose different paths. Politics is not stated frontally, but it infuses through the staging. A siren blares, then another immediately follows. Flashing lights illuminate the scene, while a crowd gathers. Then, a face-off between youths and law enforcement occurs, creating a particular atmosphere. This lineage highlights a difference. The son favors sensory shock, the father the architecture of the narrative. Yet, a common concern runs through both: understanding how the individual struggles with the era.
The Kourtrajmé collective nurtures this uniqueness. At its origin, there is friendship, craftsmanship, the desire to create and learn by filming. The Kourtrajmé school, founded later, extends this gesture. It outlines a simple idea: the image as a tool of emancipation, the street as a natural setting, the margins as protagonists. In this crucible, Romain Gavras found the energy that irrigates his films: a refusal of lukewarmness, a tenacious belief in the power of forms, a curiosity for collective dynamics.
The art of the music video, a laboratory of style
Justice, M.I.A., Jay-Z and Kanye West: these names mark the trajectory of a director who has mastered the art of the short musical format. With Stress by Justice, he captured the latent violence haunting certain streets. This provokes a debate on representation. Then, the question of his responsibility is raised. With Born Free, he brushed against political allegory, using unbearable images to better question the gaze. No Church in the Wild sealed the alliance between mythological breath and urban anger. Each time, the same motif returns: the crowd, the group in motion, momentum and breakage. The camera seeks less to explain than to make one feel.
This laboratory feeds the cinema. The bursts of intensity, the block writing, the trust in the duration of the shot become narrative weapons. In Gavras’s work, editing is not a crutch, but an internal rhythm, that of a pulse. The image does not reassure, it exposes. The viewer is placed in the midst of the tumult, urged to decide where to look. This demanding ethic of the gaze aligns with an era saturated with images where attention scatters. Here, on the contrary, it focuses, drawn in by the centripetal force of a shot that refuses distraction.
Current events as a hook, the work as a compass
Let’s return to Manhattan, to this Sunday, November 9, 2025, to these kisses that ignite the gossip pages. According to the headlines relaying the snapshots, the public display of affection suggests an assumed relationship. But a principle prevails: caution with the conditional, respect for privacy, refusal of intrusion. What interests us is how this sidewalk scene illuminates an artist’s journey.
A filmmaker obsessed with urban energy, flows, and collisions is naturally captivated by a New York stroll. One might read, by ricochet, a form of appeasement. The man who films conflagration here accepts the simplicity of a tender gesture. Reality, sometimes, offers its countershots. And the public, fond of stories, projects onto this image what it loves to guess: the sketch of a romance.
Emily Ratajkowski, for her part, has long advanced with rare lucidity on fame, sexuality, and the gaze cast on bodies. Divorced in 2022, mother of a child born in 2021, she cultivates a social presence that asserts as much as it protects. Her extreme notoriety fuels curiosities and enthusiasms. Hence the embarrassment when it comes to naming what has not yet been said by the primary parties involved. We will therefore stick to public facts, and to the cultural angle that concerns us: the portrait of a filmmaker caught that day, in the favor of a smile.
What his images say about the man
Looking at the films and music videos of Romain Gavras, one detects obsessions. First, speed. The stories start very quickly, as if it were necessary to immediately find the heartbeat that will govern the whole. Then, community: even when the story follows a protagonist, the group never disappears, it encircles, it attracts, it carries away. Finally, ritualization: sirens, banners, fires, saturated colors, martial music. The scenes are set up like profane ceremonies. These choices reveal a temperament, a way of living the world through successive intensities.
There remains a softer side, perceptible in The World Is Yours, a trompe-l’œil comedy. Affection for the characters rivals with the taste for chaos. From this balance emerges an author’s figure: a conductor who loves the crash. However, he knows how to leave room for joyful disarray, unexpected tenderness, and fantasy. The man seen in New York is not far from the filmmaker: a body caught in the city, among passersby, with the desire to move forward, and, sometimes, to stop.
Critical reception: praise, reservations, debates
Athena has often been criticized for igniting reality without explaining it. It has also been praised for translating the vertigo of a fractured era into cinema. Festivals have hailed the mastery of its direction. However, critics have pointed out the occasionally too geometric clarity of its message. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: the discussion it sparks attests to its place in the landscape. In French cinema, often tempted by intimate subtlety, Gavras’s spectacular gesture is a necessary deviation. It opens an air corridor where virtuosity is not the enemy of ambition.
Trajectory and line of force
These markers outline less a curriculum than a line of force: born from a collective gesture, tempered in music videos as a motor of invention, Gavras’s cinema advances through accelerations and risks, from feverish tales to baroque thrillers and then to tense frescoes. This trajectory has mattered more in critical discussion than in awards. Indeed, it reveals an author betting on form to test reality and preferring the imprint to the trophy.
What a stolen image changes
The photographs that triggered the New York excitement remind us of an obvious fact: the right to image is not a detail. They exist because the public space is open to all eyes. However, their reuse follows specific licenses, defined territories, and contractual durations. Behind the lightness of a walk, there is the agency industry. Moreover, there is the speed of online newsrooms and the whirlwind of replays. This ecosystem imposes a methodical hygiene on those who report the news: verify, attribute, contextualize. Privacy is better protected when hypotheses are limited. Indeed, one must stick to the only elements useful for cultural illumination.
Filmography of Romain Gavras and collaborations
Three feature films stand out, drawing a curve: Our Day Will Come: a glowing wander, raw force, black poetry. The World Is Yours: tender and fierce pastiche, a gallery of spirited actors, elegance of a gaze that deflates the mythologies of banditry. Athena: a white-hot fresco, operatic gesture, a partition of larger-than-life images. Among the three, a same determination: to make the world felt rather than explained.
Around these films, collaborations have shaped the signature: M.I.A., Justice, Jay-Z, and Kanye West. The music video forges a baroque theater where symbols weigh and basses resonate. Moreover, these short works dialogue with the features, bringing them speed, ritualization, and a sense of the collective. They are not parentheses, but decisive exchanges that have nourished Gavras’s visual grammar and strengthened his unique place.
Last shot in Manhattan
Evening falls. The sky over New York darkens like a screen. One would wish for the scene to continue, and for the couple to walk away in slow motion. Moreover, one would like to hear the distant sound of a siren. Perhaps tomorrow, those involved will speak up. Surely not. We will keep a clear image of this Sunday: hands finding each other and shared laughter. Additionally, in the background, the shadow of a director appears, one who usually prefers the arena of film sets. Romain Gavras does not need a romance to exist; his work is enough. But the romance, if there is one, tells in its own way something about his desire for the world. Let it live, and let’s return to the films.