La petite fabrique des goûts et des couleurs
2026 · 2m
Directed by Marie Castel
Genres: essay film, experimental, family
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
On a 1990s Sunday morning, a father films his two daughters on VHS in a single long take as they dance and discover their movements; those images meet audio recordings from relatives answering 'Where do you see Beauty?', sounds and images carrying the traces of their journeys through time.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's formally restrained in a way that feels almost conservative—a single VHS take, voices answering a straightforward question—but Castel's refusal to manipulate or poeticize the material, letting the daughters just *be*, creates something genuinely weird and uncomfortable that sneaks up on you.
The film sits squarely in the lineage of structural essay cinema and family archive work (think Marker, Varda), using the VHS aesthetic not as nostalgia but as a formal constraint that sharpens how we attend to the body and voice as traces of time.
The decision to hold the camera still while the daughters discover their own movement—letting their learning happen in unedited space rather than cutting to the rhythm—makes the whole piece breathe with a kind of earned intimacy that costs nothing but attention.