Mont Noir
2024 · 15m · France
Directed by Erika Haglund, Jean-Baptiste Peltier
Genres: biography, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Marguerite suffers three childhood losses — her mother, her dog, and her nursemaid — and, alone in the nature of Mont Noir, finds her path to becoming a writer.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A lush, literary coming-of-age about grief and artistic awakening—competent, sure, but it's doing exactly what you'd expect a film about a future writer's formative losses to do, and I'm not sure the nature cinematography breaks that mold enough to justify my attention.
Haglund and Peltier construct a formally exquisite meditation on loss and artistic becoming, where each childhood severance is given spatial and temporal weight; the film sits comfortably within a European biographical tradition while earning its restraint through meticulous composition and the measured unfolding of Marguerite's interior landscape.
The decision to let silence and landscape do the emotional work rather than underscore the three losses with music or voiceover—that restraint is what transforms this from a familiar grief narrative into something that trusts the viewer to sit with the absence, and it's the kind of choice that separates a well-made short from a quietly devastating one.
Festivals
- Palm Springs International ShortFest 2025
- Anima 2025
- Vila do Conde International Short Film Festival 2024
- Kino Athens International Film Festival 2026