Ascension
2026 · 2m
Directed by Adria Desaleux, Dorianne Gontard Mary
Genres: adventure, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Climbing toward a summit, Lucy confronts her demons — or the mountain's — on an initiatory path through the injunctions to beauty, undertaken both for herself and for her mirror: nature.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a woman climbing a mountain while contemplating her inner demons — it's the kind of earnest mythic-journey setup that usually puts me to sleep, but Desaleux and Gontard Mary seem aware enough of the cliché that I'm curious whether they're subverting it or just executing it with enough visual rigor that I won't notice I've seen this film before.
Ascension sits confidently in a lineage of coming-of-age cinema that treats the mountain as both literal and metaphorical threshold — the restraint in its 2-minute duration and the formal decision to interweave the climber's internal confrontation with her relationship to nature suggests filmmakers attuned to how much can be held in a single, sustained visual metaphor.
The gamble here is whether the mirror conceit — Lucy climbing for herself *and* for nature as her reflection — actually lands in execution, and if it does, it's because two directors trusted a single compositional or editorial choice to carry that conceptual weight without explaining it.