I Paliri
2026 · 2m
Directed by Guillaume Prats
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Living in a refuge atop Corsica's I Paliri, 65-year-old Alain has made solitude his kingdom; his story transforms the perception of his isolation into an ode to authenticity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 65-year-old hermit living on a Corsican mountain—sounds like the setup for a cliché meditation on nature and withdrawal, which is probably why everyone else will pass on it; Prats might actually be making something weirder about the mythology of solitude itself, but the premise gives nothing away, and that opacity is either genius or disaster.
Prats situates this portrait in the long lineage of contemplative documentary—Vigo, perhaps, or the essay films that treat landscape as philosophical argument—and the tenderness of the framing suggests a filmmaker acutely aware of how to photograph both a man and his chosen world as inseparable formal objects.
Two minutes to transform isolation from loneliness into authenticity is a high-wire act; the decision to film Alain within his refuge rather than extracting him into interpretation is the kind of spatial choice that either collapses or carries the entire emotional weight.