TRACES
2026 · 2m
Directed by Antoine Biguet, Maxime castello
Genres: drama, fantasy, romance
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A woman hates her beauty marks without knowing they are traces left by her soulmate across their past lives; touching them, she travels through different eras and rediscovers a love reincarnated incarnation after incarnation, and back in the present she chooses to keep them, finding them beautiful for the first time.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The soulmate-marks conceit is schmaltzy territory, but Biguet and Castello subvert it by making the woman's self-hatred the real story—she doesn't get absolved by romance, she gets reclaimed by it, which is weirder and meaner than the premise promises.
The film locates itself in a lineage of reincarnation romance (Rohmer's cyclical time, Cocteau's mythic doubling) and executes that lineage with considered visual restraint; the editing across eras refuses sentimentality and instead builds a formal argument about beauty as recognition rather than appearance.
The decision to make the soulmate invisible—to render their presence only through touch and the woman's reaction to touch—does extraordinary work in two minutes; it forces the performance and the camera to carry the entire emotional architecture instead of leaning on a second actor or voiceover.