BEAUTIFUL LIFE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Aretha Iskandar
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Alya and Mara, two young Iranian women, cross the border to reach Europe, dreaming of a 'beautiful life'.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes on migration and dream-chasing sounds like every festival tearjerker, but Iskandar's refusal to sentimentalize the journey—treating desperation as matter-of-fact rather than melodrama—is genuinely unsettling in ways that actually stick.
A formally restrained piece that situates itself in the lineage of Haneke and slow cinema; the economy of gesture and the measured pacing suggest a filmmaker attuned to how restraint can deepen empathy without collapsing into sentimentality.
The decision to anchor the narrative in the mundane physicality of the crossing—footsteps, breath, fabric—rather than grand emotional peaks transforms a familiar premise into something tactile and irreducible; it's the kind of detail-work that makes constraint feel like vision.