Il était une fois...
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alexandre Tchobanoff, Prisca Lona
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A Lady lives alone by the sea, peacefully with her books, apart from the world — until the day two young women burst into her life. A tale between winds and tides, between sky and earth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a hermit's solitude gets invaded by intruders and it's treated as *myth* rather than threat—sure, it's formally pretty, but the premise is basically 'woman's peace disturbed' which is ancient and safe, no matter how many tides you throw at it.
Tchobanoff and Lona craft a deliberate visual grammar here—the composition of isolation, the intrusion of the feminine, echoes of everything from fairy tale to Bresson—and in 120 seconds they've built a complete formal argument about liminality and arrival that'll sustain serious conversation.
The choice to hold on the Lady's face as recognition dawns—that micro-performance shift from closed to permeable—does the entire emotional work of the film; it's restraint that costs nothing and buys everything.