COQUILLE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Neoma Mati Bacelar, Alix Dufau
Genres: coming-of-age, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A beach holds enough treasures for Odile and her mother to collect all kinds of shells — but you never know what the tide might bring up from the depths.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes of shell-collecting sounds like the most boring pitch imaginable—except the tide metaphor actually *works*, that creeping sense that something unknowable surfaces beneath the domestic routine. It's a fairy tale that doesn't announce itself.
Bacelar and Dufau situate themselves in a lineage of poetic family cinema, the kind where small rituals accumulate into something mythic; the formal restraint—holding on beachcombing as a frame for generational depth—recalls a quieter European tradition.
The whole film pivots on a single tonal choice: playing the shell-collection as genuinely precious rather than cute, and that decision—treating a mother-daughter ritual with the weight of ceremony—is what transmutes two minutes of beach footage into something that lands like memory.