Les Amants Maudits
2026 · 2m
Directed by Inès Boudjemâa
Genres: drama, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
One evening, a father reads his daughter Lily a tale: the story of two cursed lovers, a prince and a princess from enemy camps, condemned to dance together for the rest of their days — followed by an intimate discussion between father and daughter.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A bedtime story about cursed lovers dancing forever should be dark enough to snap necks, but instead it's reverent—and somehow that refusal to wink at the audience is more unsettling than any subversion could be.
Boudjemâa locates the film in a lineage of literary fairy tale cinema while understanding that the real sophistication lives in the frame-shift: the mythic distance of the curse tale suddenly collapsing into the intimate geography of a father and daughter—a formal architecture that earns its tenderness.
The pivot from storybook register to domestic conversation could flatten into sentimentality, but the decision to let silence and breathing space carry the emotional weight between those two bodies in the dark does the heavy lifting that dialogue wouldn't.