Le Chat Beauté
2026 · 2m
Directed by Faustine Chopin, Maxime Skolozdrzy Tallet
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
Anna, an actress struggling to find her place in a world obsessed with appearances, is drawn by Beauté, a cunning and mischievous cat, into a subtle ruse that awakens a dormant memory and a new way of seeing beauty.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A cat-led spiritual awakening dressed up in indie-film drag—it's the kind of whimsy that usually makes me roll my eyes, but something about Chopin and Tallet's refusal to explain the ruse keeps it from collapsing into greeting-card sentimentality.
The premise sits comfortably in a lineage of metamorphosis narratives (Cocteau, perhaps a whisper of Vigo), and there's a formal control here in how the film chooses not to dramatize its own magic—it's a choice that speaks to filmmakers aware of their tradition.
Two minutes isn't much, but the decision to let the cat be genuinely alien rather than cute, and to pin the entire emotional turn on how Anna's gaze shifts rather than what happens, is the kind of specific restraint that suggests real filmmakers at work.