LA FÉE MINISTE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Sonia Joubert, Priscilla Lopes
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In 1965, under the gaze of her eldest daughter, a mother strives to be an "ideal" woman. But what does she transmit to her daughter through all her efforts to be beautiful?
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes on the transmission of feminine performance across generations—it's competent, even touching, but it's also exactly the film you'd expect about mothers and daughters and impossible beauty standards; there's no twist, no formal rupture, just a well-intentioned mirror held up to a problem everyone already sees.
A formally precise distillation of the mirror-and-gaze motif that runs through Mulvey, Vincendeau, and the best of feminist cinema—the 1965 frame, the daughter's witnessing, the elliptical editing that lets us feel what isn't shown; this is a film that knows exactly where it sits in a lineage and executes with rigor.
The choice to shoot through the daughter's gaze—holding her as the still center while the mother performs beauty rituals around her—transforms what could be sermon into something lived; that compositional decision alone is what makes two minutes feel like revelation rather than argument.