Écologie urbaine
2026 · 2m
Directed by Axel Desmarets
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Through the eyes of a person who performs and observes them, the film follows the beauty of ecological gestures, from individual to collective, moving from inside to outside, into the city.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
An essay film about ecological gestures sounds like the kind of worthy, consensus-friendly thing that puts me to sleep—but Desmarets' two minutes collapse the distance between individual and collective action in a way that actually feels subversive, like he's smuggling a radical argument about complicity into what looks like gentle observation.
This is precisely the kind of formally attentive essay film that understands its lineage—the progression from interior to exterior, the patient observation of gesture—and executes it with enough considered craft that it becomes an argument about form itself, not just ecology.
The choice to filter urban ecological acts through a single performer's eyes and body—making the witness inseparable from the witnessed—is what elevates this from doc observation into something with real weight, and Desmarets pulls it off in two minutes without a wasted frame.