Pot de chagrin
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alexandra Mignien
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Thévy, a teenager of Cambodian origin, compulsively uses skin-whitening cream to become 'prettier', unaware that it is destroying her skin, her health, and her self-love.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Skin-whitening as self-harm wrapped in beauty standards—yeah, it's a premise that lands, but Mignien plays it straight when the real subversion would've been refusing to explain the damage, letting us sit in the contradiction instead.
A tightly composed meditation on internalized colorism that positions itself thoughtfully within the lineage of coming-of-age portraiture; the melancholic restraint suggests a filmmaker aware of what silence can convey that exposition cannot.
What makes this work is the specificity of the compulsion itself—not the moral lecture, but watching Thévy's hands move through ritual, the micro-decisions of application becoming the visual language of self-erasure in just 120 seconds.