Sylia
2026 · 2m · France
Directed by Yanis Laouini, Côme Fruton, Bastien Mussier
Genres: documentary, drama, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A little girl turns a seemingly peaceful territory into her playground, finding wonder and beauty in everything that crosses her path — but behind the images hides another reality. Blending fiction with authentic testimonies from young girls living through war, the film asks what remains of beauty when everything seems destroyed.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to applaud the war-doc-meets-playground conceit, but Sylia commits to it in a way that actually unsettles — it refuses the easy either/or and sits in the contradiction, which is the only honest place to be.
The formal architecture here is exceptional: three directors working in montage and layered testimony to create a film that knows exactly what it owes to the essay tradition while reinventing how we witness testimony and innocence in collision.
That cut between the girl's wonder and the testimonial voice — the moment where the two realities stop being separate — is the entire film distilled into one decision, and everything before and after proves these directors understood exactly where to break the audience's heart.