Miss Arizona
2026 · 2m
Directed by Nicolas Parent
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A grandmother who was once elected Miss Arizona and turned every head now watches her granddaughter live a similar youth in a different era, and comes to accept her own ageing.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Beauty pageant nostalgia paired with intergenerational acceptance sounds like Hallmark territory, but Parent seems genuinely uninterested in sentimentality—there's something subversive lurking in watching a former Miss Arizona *not* relive her glory through her granddaughter, which actually does make me sit up.
A spare two minutes that trusts the formal parallel between grandmother and granddaughter to do the thematic work; the restraint here—how Parent lets mirror-image compositions and the texture of aging skin against youth speak louder than voiceover—positions this squarely in the lineage of Chloé Zhao and Kelly Reichardt's aesthetic discipline applied to family portraiture.
The decision to shoot this as a visual echo—two bodies in the same frame, two eras colliding through composition—transforms what could be a trite reconciliation arc into something tactile and precise; that choice alone, clean and committed, is what separates this from every other aging-and-acceptance short out there.