Cannes 2025: The Lot Rewrites Hollywood’s Backstory Through the Eyes of Its Uninvited Founders
By Mia Galuppo | The Hollywood Reporter
In a rare and quietly charged moment at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, two films are telling the same origin story from different sides of the table. Franklin Street, directed by Cece Lewis, and The Lot, produced by Julian Toussaint-Lewis, each trace the early formation of a Black Hollywood dynasty—reaching back into the 1940s to explore how a marriage, a studio, and a series of hard-won decisions shaped a cultural empire.
But while the former leans into legacy and reputation, The Lot makes no such appeal to tradition. Directed by Garrett Bradley and written by Jihan Crowther, the film is an atmospheric, quietly radical portrait of creative sovereignty, told through the story of Everett Toussaint, the founder of Toussaint Studios, and his son Richard, whose love for Eleanor Lewis sets off a ripple of consequences neither family could anticipate.
The film premieres this week as a Special Screening at Cannes, marking one of the festival’s most anticipated U.S. titles. Bradley, known for her Oscar-nominated documentary Time, brings an observational, dreamlike intensity to the material, balancing the personal and political in equal measure.
Stephan James plays Everett with measured conviction, while Aldis Hodge delivers a standout performance as Richard, torn between familial duty and personal love. In one of the film’s most resonant moments, Everett tells his son, “We didn’t build this to be let in. We built it so they’d have to look over the fence.”
“We wanted to show what it looked like when someone made the decision not to wait. The Lot isn’t about joining the system. It’s about making space where none existed. That’s how my grandfather lived. And that’s the story we needed to tell.”
Though Lewis and Toussaint-Lewis produced their films independently—Cece through her boutique Rosedust Studios, Julian through Lockwood Pictures—the projects remain in quiet conversation. Both feature Mia Goth and Aldis Hodge in overlapping roles, and both stage a shared dinner scene from different emotional vantage points. In Franklin Street, the moment is clipped, mannered, restrained. In The Lot, the same evening plays with a simmering tension, revealing the surveillance, code-switching, and subtle resistance at play.
The film’s supporting cast includes Delroy Lindo as Everett’s father, a former stage actor turned radical educator, and breakout star Ara Myembi as Viola, Everett’s assistant and the future head of Toussaint Studios. With minimal dialogue and maximum presence, Myembi anchors the film’s quieter moments of transformation.
Though The Lot is fiction, it’s not far from lived truth.
“It’s a dramatization, sure,” Julian said. “But it’s also a map. A reminder of who was building the roads before the gates ever went up.”
The Lot premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on May 24, presented by Lockwood Pictures.
