Qu'avez-vous fait de la beauté ?
2026 · 2m
Directed by Stéphanie Ballay, Raphaël Perez de Barradas
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In a dark world where the news shows only sadness and desolation, a young girl embodying the innocence of youth asks where beauty has gone — and who erased it from the world.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent melancholy dressed up as profundity—a child-asks-big-questions premise that's been tried a hundred times, and these directors aren't subverting it, they're genuflecting to it. The sadness feels inherited, not earned.
A formally restrained essay film that positions itself squarely in the lineage of poetic documentary and allegorical short cinema; the two-minute constraint becomes an asset, forcing every frame to earn its place in a meditation on cultural memory and lost innocence. The directorial collaboration yields a composed, philosophically alert piece that will sustain argument.
The decision to let the girl's question hang unanswered in negative space—to build the entire piece around absence rather than revelation—is what transforms a thin premise into something that breathes; it's a single structural choice that makes the melancholy feel necessary rather than decorative.