LES TROIS ÉTAPES
2026 · 2m
Directed by Emilia Kwaszyńska
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young woman moves to a foreign country to change her life, where she remains invisible; a difficult everyday life is repaid by small things, and she finds beauty in maternity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A coming-of-age story about invisible displacement and maternal revelation—totally expected, totally safe, and it plays the melancholy card so straight that it almost disappears into its own premise.
Kwaszyńska situates the invisibility of migration within a formal restraint that echoes the poetic realism of early Haneke or Kiarostami—the maternity revelation becomes not sentimental catharsis but a deliberate turn within a carefully modulated visual argument about belonging and time.
In two minutes, the entire architecture hangs on what Kwaszyńska chose to *not* show us during the transition to motherhood; that structural withholding—making absence the formal substance—elevates what could've been a modest identity story into something architecturally precise.