LE TEMPS D’UNE IMAGE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Lidia Farino
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Three siblings try to repair an old camera, the fragile keeper of their late mother's memories, hoping to recover for one instant the warmth and beauty of what has flown away.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a competent grief film—siblings, broken camera, metaphor intact—but it plays it devastatingly straight; I kept waiting for Farino to crack the premise open, to find something ugly or weird in the nostalgia, and she never did.
Farino positions herself in a lineage of essay-films about memory and objects—think Marker, think Koreeda—and executes with the kind of formal restraint that trusts the viewer's intelligence; the camera itself becomes both subject and meditation on the impossibility of preservation.
The actual craft move here is the decision to keep the camera nonfunctional—to end on the not-quite-recovered image, the almost-there—which transforms what could've been sentimental into something genuinely aching about what we can never fully access.