MA DAME
2026 · 2m
Directed by Laurie Caruso, Nassim Boumaiza
Tones: contemplative, tender
A daughter prepares her mother for the evening of her dreams; nothing must be left to chance.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes of a daughter fussing over her mother's makeup—sounds like Hallmark Channel softness, but Caruso and Boumaiza are clearly doing something weirder with the obsession here; the tender surface is doing cover work for something darker, and I'm genuinely unsure what.
A formally composed study in preparation ritual that recalls the fastidious domestic cinema of Chloé Zhao and Eliza Hittman—the restraint of the frame, the refusal to sentimentalize the mother-daughter transaction, positions this squarely in a lineage of rigorous intimacy.
The entire film lives or dies on the decision to keep the mother's face just slightly out of focus during those final moments of preparation—it reframes the whole thing from vanity to vulnerability in a single compositional choice, and that's the kind of micro-precision that makes two minutes feel inevitable.