Les mauvaises herbes
2026 · 2m
Directed by Apolline Dujon
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
At thirty-two, Léonie returns to her childhood garden to tend it and announce news to her mother; facing the words and judgments that have accompanied her all her life, she must decide what to keep and what to leave behind.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A thirty-two-year-old woman returns to her childhood garden to have a conversation with her mother—it's the kind of premise that sounds like every other introspective family drama until you realize Dujon is using horticulture as a genuine metaphor for inherited judgment, not just window dressing, which is genuinely weird and unsettling in ways most shorts are too polite to attempt.
Dujon situates this firmly in the lineage of Kiarostami and early Haneke—the garden as both literal and psychological space, the two-character dialogue that functions as moral reckoning—executed with the kind of formal restraint and compositional intelligence that distinguishes a considered work from a sincere one.
The decision to let the garden itself do the emotional labor—weeds as metaphor, the specific choreography of tending versus neglecting—transforms what could be maudlin into something genuinely moving, and in two minutes that's a feat of discipline that most shorts with triple the runtime can't manage.