COMME ELLES
2026 · 2m
Directed by Myriam-Helena Sako
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Across two eras, the film follows Joanne, as a gesture inherited from childhood resurfaces and accompanies her — through this intimate detail, beauty is questioned between family transmission, the outside gaze, and the way it is perceived, commented on, and interpreted.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a gesture repeating across time could've been insufferable navel-gazing, but Sako actually commits to the perversity of it—the way inherited beauty becomes a kind of trap, commented on and distorted by every eye that touches it. It's formally restrained in a way that *refuses* catharsis, which is the only interesting move here.
Sako positions this intimate study within a long lineage of essay film and phenomenological portraiture—Marker, Varda, the French essayistic tradition—and executes with the kind of considered economy that respects both the form and the philosophical weight of her inquiry into transmission and the gaze. The two-minute frame becomes architecture; nothing wasted.
The film hinges entirely on the decision to let that single gesture—the inherited movement—be the sole throughline across both timelines, rather than loading it with explanation or emotional scaffolding; it's a structural choice that does all the heavy lifting and makes the whole thing resonate with an almost mathematical elegance despite its intimacy.