Tache de lune
2026 · 2m
Directed by Ghazal Ghorbani
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Inspired by traditional Iranian tales, the film follows a woman whose moon mark on her forehead — once a sign of grace — becomes a mark of shame in a society demanding self-effacement; under pressure to conceal it, the moon begins to wound and scar itself, as if her body were reacting to the denial of her identity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The moon-mark-as-wound conceit is conceptually sharp, but it lands a bit too neatly—the metaphor doesn't twist or resist the way it should, and the Iranian folklore anchor feels more like permission than provocation.
Ghorbani locates herself in a precise lineage of body-horror surrealism and mythic revision, and the formal choice to literalize psychological shame through metamorphosis—the mark wounding itself—shows a curator's hand; this is the kind of film that rewrites what we think traditional allegory can do.
The decision to animate the mark's deterioration as active self-injury rather than passive scarring is the fulcrum that makes this work; it's the one choice that transforms the film from metaphor into lived bodily reality, and on a 2-minute budget that specificity is everything.