Beauté Funèbre
2026 · 2m
Directed by Aneso Bartoli
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After the brutal disappearance of their mother, three children find themselves facing the incomprehensible - and wonder whether death, beyond the darkness, might also reveal a form of beauty.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Here's the trap most films fall into with grief: they wallow. Beauté Funèbre does something weirder—it holds three children at the threshold between devastation and something almost transcendent, refusing to pick a side, and somehow that refusal is the whole point.
Bartoli positions this squarely within the European lyrical tradition—Tarkovsky's patience with the unspeakable, Bresson's restraint—but channels it through the specific grammar of children's perception, where metaphysics and sensory detail collapse into each other; the formal precision of that collapse is what lingers.
In two minutes, the choice to render death's incomprehensibility through *beauty* rather than horror or explanation—and to trust sound design over exposition to carry that weight—is the entire film, and it works because Bartoli commits to it with complete formal clarity.