Petite reine
2026 · 2m
Directed by Suzana Joaquim Maudslay
Genres: coming-of-age, family, fantasy
Tones: mythic, tender, whimsical
This year, seven-year-old Nina writes her letter to Santa with an unusual list: masks and creams to be pretty like the girls in magazines. Then Cleopatra steps out of her Oriental carpet to confide a thousand-year-old secret.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the fantasy-fixes-body-image-angst move, but Joaquim Maudslay's actually interested in something weirder: a kid's vanity as a legit emotional starting point, not a problem to solve with girl-power carpet magic—and that refusal to be reassuring is exactly why it works.
The film's real lineage is fairy tale portraiture—Perrault, not Instagram—and the formal decision to have Cleopatra emerge as a historical confidante rather than a corrective voice positions this squarely in a tradition that trusts myth to complicate rather than clarify childhood desire.
In two minutes, the single choice that makes this land is the Cleopatra reveal itself—not as salvation, but as witnessed recognition—and that one beat of a child being seen by an ancient figure rather than lectured reframes the entire emotional architecture of the piece.