La forêt de l’espace
2019 · 30m · France
Directed by Victor Missud
Genres: experimental, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Men sent to the Moon to vegetate it wait among the forest they grew for the Earthlings' arrival, telling memories of their lives on Earth — but who are they, and were they forgotten?
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects sci-fi moon colonization to be about conquest or survival—Missud just decides it's about *waiting in a forest you built*, and suddenly the whole genre collapses into something genuinely unsettling; the fact that it works is almost annoying because it's so beautifully, defiantly uninterested in the plot you think you want.
A formally rigorous meditation on absence and temporal slippage that positions itself thoughtfully within the sci-fi pastoral tradition—the controlled pacing and spatial language of the forest create a contemplative register that rewards the kind of close looking cinema used to demand.
The decision to anchor the entire film's vertigo in the characters' *voices alone*—memory fragments without clear origin, disembodied testimony among trees—is the hinge that transforms a high-concept premise into something genuinely uncanny on a minimal budget.