Haven

The scouts

A two-minute poem about beauty across continents sounds like the kind of Hallmark greeting card that makes me roll my eyes, except de Solages somehow dodges the obvious—there's a rigor to the constraint that keeps it from collapsing into sentiment.

This sits squarely in the essay-film tradition, using geographical distance as formal architecture; the restraint of the runtime and the deliberate pairing of French and New Zealand imagery recall the structural elegance of mid-century avant-garde cinema, a lineage de Solages respects rather than fights.

The entire film hinges on how the edit balances two geographies without letting either overwhelm—that choice of parallel cutting, of when to hold and when to cross-fade between hemispheres, is what transforms a nice travel observation into something that actually *feels* connected.