La beauté que je n'ai pas su voir
2026 · 2m
Directed by Sana Tounsi, Gabriel Diot, Mathilde Anne Delckie, Mouna Idballa
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A mother packs her deceased daughter's belongings into a box; consumed by the loss, she remembers the beauty of the ordinary things her child saw every day and that she never learned to look at while her daughter was alive.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a grief film that does the opposite of what grief films usually do—no catharsis, no redemption arc, just the unbearable specificity of what wasn't noticed. Still, the four-director approach feels more safe than subversive; I kept waiting for it to break its own form and never quite got there.
The film's restraint in the face of loss—the way it lets ordinary objects carry the weight of attention the mother failed to give—positions itself squarely in the lineage of Koreeda and late-period Haneke; the pacing and compositional discipline here feel earned, and the 2-minute duration acts as formal constraint rather than limitation.
What catches is the decision to let the daughter's vision—what *she* noticed—become the film's visual language rather than the mother's; that shift in perspective, held across 120 seconds with a four-person creative team, is where the entire emotional architecture turns.