La Kitouge
2021 · 4m · France
Directed by Emma Brun
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Eight-year-old Lucien, too young to play on the family computer, secretly films his older siblings with a camcorder to feel part of the family.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent, genuinely touching meditation on exclusion—but it's also exactly the coming-of-age film everyone expects it to be, hitting every tender beat without a single moment that makes you go 'wait, WHAT?' Brun's got heart, just not heresy.
Brun situates herself within a precise lineage of Dardenne-adjacent observational cinema, where the camera becomes the child's eye and yearning is expressed through absence; the formal restraint here—what we don't see through the camcorder—recalls the best of contemporary European minimalism.
The decision to filter Lucien's presence entirely through his own shaky camcorder footage—never letting us see him direct, only the world he's recording—is what unlocks the whole thing; it's a single formal choice that transforms a familiar scenario into something achingly specific about invisibility.