Jusqu'au beau de la nuit
2026 · 2m
Directed by Perrine Prieur
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In the silence and solitude of her insomnia, a mother sighs, rages, boils and mutters, blaming herself for not sleeping while, for once, everyone else is asleep. A film about maternal love — blind, unconditional, and resistant to exhaustion and daily wear.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a woman not sleeping feels like the kind of sentimental trap that usually makes me roll my eyes, except Prieur refuses to let it be cathartic — there's no redemption arc, just the furnace of maternal guilt staying lit. It's frustratingly smart in its refusal to comfort.
A precise formal study in the essay-film tradition — the sighing, muttering, and self-recrimination layered against silence construct a meditation on motherhood that recalls Agnès Varda's intimate phenomenology, all accomplished in two minutes with deliberate compositional restraint.
The sound design choice here is devastating: the mother's voice becomes almost clinical, each sigh and blame-syllable foregrounded so starkly that you feel the insomnia as acoustic texture rather than narrative problem — that single decision transforms navel-gazing into something visceral and new.