Léo et Emma
2026 · 2m
Directed by Onur Selçuk
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After losing a loved one, Léo and Emma discover that the beauty of the bonds tightening around them helps to carry the grief.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of people hugging through sadness—it's the kind of tender-grief orthodoxy that makes me roll my eyes, except Selçuk's restraint actually works against expectation; there's something almost defiant about refusing to wring sentiment out of loss.
Léo et Emma sits comfortably in the lineage of contemporary European minimalism—think Carné or early Koreeda—where formal quietness becomes the vessel for emotional weight; the composition and pacing suggest a filmmaker thinking carefully about how cinema holds space for grief.
The real lift here is probably a single choice—whether it's the decision to keep the frame almost still, or the sound design that lets silence do the work, or a micro-performance gesture—that transforms what could be sentimental into something that actually lands.