MEINE LIEBE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Honoré Berenger
Genres: drama, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
During the Liberation, a young woman named Esmée is publicly humiliated and has her head shaved in the street.
Picked by Margot
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Two minutes of a woman getting her head shaved during the Liberation sounds like a provocation waiting to happen, but Berenger treats it with such solemn restraint that it becomes almost boring—which is the opposite of what I expected, and maybe that's the point, though I'm not convinced it is.
Berenger positions this act of public humiliation within a precise historical moment and visual tradition of occupation cinema, and the formal discipline—how he frames the crowd, the ritual nature of the violence—situates *Meine Liebe* as a meditation on collective complicity that recalls both Rossellini and the Straubs' approach to historical shame.
The decision to keep Esmée's face largely obscured or turned away while the camera holds on the crowd's expressions does the heavy lifting here—it shifts the film from being about her victimization to being about us watching, and that single framing choice transforms what could have been exploitation into something genuinely unsettling.