The Purple Season
2023 · 9m · France
Directed by Clémence Bouchereau
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
On a mangrove island outside civilization, a group of girls lives to the rhythm of the climate while hunting geese, navigating puberty, and renegotiating who leads the pack.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's formally restrained enough that you almost miss how weird it is—girls hunting geese on a mangrove island while negotiating pack hierarchy feels like it should be twee, but Bouchereau refuses sentiment, which is the contrarian move that actually lands.
Bouchereau situates herself carefully within the tradition of contemplative coming-of-age cinema, particularly the French lineage of Céline Sciamma, using landscape and ritual as both aesthetic choice and narrative logic with considerable formal discipline.
The decision to anchor the entire film in the physicality of the hunt—the weight of the gun, the girls' bodies moving through water—rather than their interior monologues is what transforms this from sensitive-girlhood-in-nature into something genuinely singular and earned.