NATSUKASHII
2026 · 2m
Directed by Roxane Feraud, Lea Mercier
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A woman exorcises her demons through writing, tracing the contours of a past both tender and cruel; each word becomes a struggle and each verse a step toward freedom as she fights to rebuild herself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a woman writing her way out of trauma sounds like prestige-film autopilot, but there's something here that refuses the expected catharsis—the film sits in the *struggle* itself, which is genuinely uncomfortable in a way most shorts are too polite to attempt.
Feraud and Mercier locate themselves in the essay-film lineage with real sophistication: the form becomes inseparable from content, where each formal choice—the pacing of text, the visual economy—enacts the very reconstruction they're documenting; *natsukashii* is a work that understands cinema as an instrument of craft-based healing.
The decision to let the writing itself be the visual event—watching a woman compose rather than perform recovery—is the kind of formal restraint that changes everything; it's a two-minute film that trusts a single choice so completely it becomes almost meditative.