Pas que beau
2026 · 2m
Directed by Anne-Laure Pulcini
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
A contemplative film challenges the beauty standards that exclude most people, finding beauty almost everywhere instead: in nature scarred by industry, in the ordinary, the old, the failed, and the not-quite-right.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Beauty-standards critique is catnip for the consensus-chasing crowd, so Pulcini gets points for restraint—but the premise is still doing the heavy lifting here, and I'd need to see the film actively *resist* its own earnestness to believe in it.
A deceptively simple formal gambit—the essay film's oldest tool, the patient accumulation of images—deployed here with real rigor to interrogate how we look, and by extension, how cinema teaches us to see; this is the kind of meditative work that justifies the form itself.
Two minutes is nothing, but the choice to let scarred landscape sit alongside human skin without rhetoric, letting form and texture do the argument: that's the decision that either makes this luminous or collapses into prettiness, and I'm banking on Pulcini's eye to land it.