BEAUX SOUVENIRS
2026 · 2m
Directed by François Le Guen
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A woman visits her father, who has Alzheimer's, in a retirement home; he shares his most beautiful memories with a stranger he believes is his childhood friend, and his daughter wonders whether she too can see beauty despite the illness.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a Sundance-approved meditation on memory and daughterly love—exactly the kind of respectable, well-made grief film that festivals eat up and I'd normally skip; but Le Guen's refusal to sentimentalize the father's confusion, his willingness to let the daughter's ambivalence breathe, edges toward something genuinely unsettling beneath the tenderness.
Le Guen operates within the classical family-drama tradition while demonstrating remarkable formal restraint—the editing knows when not to cut, the sound design distinguishes between the father's internal landscape and external reality without ever announcing itself, and the final beat resists the redemptive arc we've been trained to expect, instead asking whether beauty and loss can coexist without resolution.
That two-minute runtime could have been maudlin, but the decision to let the daughter's face remain mostly still while her father's memories flood the space—letting us read her negotiation of love and helplessness in micro-expressions rather than dialogue—is the move that transforms it from sensitive subject matter into something that actually lands.