Cycle
2025 · 5m · Francia
Directed by Amelie Devauchelle, Eva Degli-Innocenti, Lucie Amherdt, Clémence Fischbach, Loreline Clement
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A young woman's world is suddenly turned upside down when a goddess appears and transforms the cocoon of her childhood, in an animated short about the menstrual cycle — what happens in women's bodies and hearts, month after month.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Five directors collaborating on a five-minute meditation about menstruation could've been precious or didactic—instead they've made something genuinely strange, where bodily reality and mythic transformation coexist without apology or explanation, which is refreshingly uninterested in the consensus that says this subject needs demystifying or normalizing.
The film's formal restraint—how it lets animation breathe in negative space, how the goddess functions as both literal and symbolic intervention—positions it within a lineage of feminist avant-garde cinema that treats the body as material for visual philosophy rather than narrative convenience.
The singular choice here is the decision to let the animation *pause* at moments of internal transformation, holding on abstraction rather than completing the cycle, which transforms what could have been educational into something genuinely felt—five filmmakers trusting that incompleteness is more honest than explanation.