Kristen Stewart's directorial debut at Cannes leaves her feeling like proud parent

Kristen Stewart said on Saturday that making her directorial debut with "The Chronology of Water" at the Cannes Film Festival felt like sending a child off to school for the first time.

"I'm so proud of it. It's like watching your kid go to school," Stewart told Reuters the day after her film's premiere. "It feels like all of a sudden the things that I've wanted to do for just so long happened all at the same time," said the actor who rose to fame with the "Twilight" series and received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Britain's Princess Diana in the film Spencer.

"My head is spinning, but in the best way," she added.

Her film is adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch's 2011 memoir of the same name that chronicles the author's attempt to escape an abusive household through competitive swimming in the 1980s and eventual path to becoming a respected author.

British actor Imogen Poots, known for Green Room and 28 Weeks Later, stars as Yuknavitch in what The Rolling Stone lauded as an "all-or-nothing type of performance".

"There's a line in the book that made me want to make it a movie, which is like, 'Can you hold life and death in the same sentence?' And that's what cinema can do," said Stewart.

"With this movie, we can just speak to the fact that the things that happen don't matter as much as how you process those things and define them within your own body," she added.

Stewart's film is competing in the second-tier Un Certain Regard section, where actors Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson are also marking their first time as directors.

The Chronology of Water was met with positive reviews, with Deadline calling it a "raw and intricately constructed take on a biopic" and The Guardian giving it three out of five stars.