BEAUTE NOIRE
2026 · 2m
Directed by christiane Doret
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
On a walk by a lake, a photographer observes nature and captures the silence, in a place that recalls one she photographed the previous summer by the ocean, where an artist had sublimated the vestiges of war.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a woman thinking about thinking about a place—it's almost *too* restrained, a deliberate non-event that somehow works as a rebuke to narrative hunger, though I suspect most people will just call it slow.
Doret situates herself squarely in the essay-film lineage, where subjective memory and landscape become philosophical tools; the structure—present observation shadowed by past encounter—recalls the formal rigor of Akerman or Varda, asking what it means to witness the same space twice.
The decision to let silence carry the weight rather than score it, and to intercut two moments of looking without spelling their relationship, creates a kind of temporal vertigo that a bigger budget would probably overcomplicate.