Au Cœur du Vercors
2026 · 2m
Directed by Elodie Lorquet
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
In the high plateaus of the Vercors, mountain wildlife reveals itself to discreet visitors as majestic species, long disappeared from the massif, return.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a nature doc, which is fine, but there's nothing here that *breaks* the form—just competent wildlife footage dressed in contemplative French restraint. I'd rather watch something that makes me question what a nature film can be.
Lorquet's formal economy is striking: two minutes to compose a meditation on ecological return, where every frame of the Vercors becomes an argument about time and restoration. This is documentary as elegiac gesture, situated squarely in the lineage of essayistic landscape cinema.
The choice to let absence speak as loudly as presence—building the film around species that *have returned* rather than showing constant action—is the quiet decision that transforms this from nice nature footage into something genuinely affecting.