À travers ma mère
2026 · 2m
Directed by Béatrice Dagousset
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In a family where everything seems perfect, teenager Léonie's balance tips the day her mother starts criticising her appearance; the remarks take root and dig invisible wounds, her acne becoming the mirror of her torments, as she seeks to become the best version of herself physically while extinguished mentally.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a coming-of-age story about body image to wallow in self-loathing or triumph-through-acceptance; Dagousset just lets the acne sit there as metaphor without fanfare, which is either brutally honest or deliberately boring depending on your tolerance for restraint.
The formal precision of mapping interior psychological dissolution onto dermatological detail recalls a lineage of French introspective cinema—Bresson's economy of gesture, perhaps—where the smallest visible markers become the entire landscape of suffering.
In two minutes, Dagousset makes the choice to photograph skin texture with the same tender, unblinking focus reserved for the face itself, refusing to separate the physical from the emotional, and that refusal is what makes this work.