La beauté du geste
2026 · 2m
Directed by Cédric Ferrand
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
A clumsy single father desperately tries to rebuild his bond with his teenage daughter. After several failures, he bets everything on an idea as simple as it is beautiful — one that will change everything.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A father-daughter reconciliation story is basically the comfort food of prestige drama, and Ferrand's doing exactly what we've seen a hundred times—so why does the premise hint that something genuinely strange is lurking underneath that tender surface? I'm skeptical, but I'm listening.
The restraint here feels deliberate: two minutes to chart emotional terrain that lesser filmmakers would bloat into twenty, positioning this within a lineage of economical French domestic cinema that trusts gesture over explanation.
The whole thing lives or dies on that final 'simple but beautiful' idea, and everything before it is scaffolding—which means Ferrand either nailed one precise narrative choice that makes the whole thing sing, or he didn't, and there's nowhere to hide in 120 seconds.