Camille Henrot Returns To Film After A Decade-With An Instant Classic

Nearly 10 years after her last moving-image work, French artist Camille Henrot (b. 1978) is returning to film with a new premiere timed to a major New York moment: the reopening of the New Museum. This week, the institution unveils Henrot's“In the Veins” (2026), a 35-minute film presented as part of“New Humans,” a sprawling exhibition that positions contemporary art against shifting ideas of the body, technology, and survival.

Henrot has been developing the project for more than five years. The release marks her first new film since“Saturday” (2017), and arrives with the weight of a formidable precedent. Her breakout work,“Grosse Fatigue” (2013), won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale and later appeared on ARTnews's and Frieze's lists of the 21st century's best artworks.

“In the Veins” turns its attention to caretaking as both a daily practice and a moral problem in an era of climate crisis. The film interweaves footage shot in wildlife rehabilitation centers with scenes of children and domestic routines, drawing a line between intimate gestures and planetary precarity. Animals are treated, handled, and coaxed back toward life; children move through the small rituals of growing up. The juxtaposition is not simply illustrative. It frames care as a form of labor that can feel tender and insufficient at once.

Henrot has described being struck by the choreography of early parenting: the handwork of feeding, bathing, and soothing, and the way those repetitive actions can take on an epic scale when viewed up close. That attention to gesture becomes a structural principle in the film, which emphasizes rhythm and recurrence. Henrot worked with longtime film editor Yann Chapotel to sharpen that sense of patterning.

The film's voiceover extends the work's layered approach to knowledge and feeling. It combines a dialogue with Jennifer Atkinson, excerpts from a New York Times article, and recordings of Henrot's child reading homework. The result is a collage of registers: research and reportage alongside the unguarded cadence of family life.

“In the Veins” also revisits a tension Henrot has pointed to in childhood culture: the saturation of animal imagery in early learning and bedtime stories, set against the environmental reality of endangered species and habitat collapse. In the film, that dissonance becomes a quiet engine, pushing the viewer to consider what it means to teach wonder while living with climate grief.

After its New York debut,“In the Veins” is slated for European presentations this summer at Luma Arles and Copenhagen Contemporary, extending the film's reach beyond the New Museum's reopening season. For Henrot, whose earlier work helped define a generation's visual language for information overload and ecological anxiety, the new film signals a shift in scale: from the encyclopedic sweep of“Grosse Fatigue” to a closer, more domestic register - without relinquishing the larger stakes.

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