Amazing Grace
2026 · 2m
Directed by Siham Bengoua
Tones: contemplative, tender
Marked by a painful past and in love with a man she has never met, a woman has pushed back every date, prisoner of her wounds and fear of rejection; as she finally finds the courage to go and meet him, the film questions the perception of beauty in a world dominated by image and social networks.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute meditation on rejection and self-image that could've been a Hallmark card, but Bengoua resists the easy catharsis—the film knows better than to let us off the hook with beauty redemption, and that refusal is genuinely unsettling.
There's a lineage here—Bresson's attention to the face, contemporary cinema's reckoning with image-making—and Bengoua orchestrates these tensions with formal precision, each frame considered as both mirror and interrogation.
The single choice that detonates this whole thing is the decision to withhold or reframe the actual meeting: everything lives in the approach, the breath before, which transforms a premise about courage into something about the stories we construct before reality arrives.