Un mot
2026 · 2m
Directed by Maëlle Truillet, Tristan Langolf, Paul Santinho
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
What is your most beautiful word? The film puts the question to passers-by, stopping to listen as each answer becomes a doorway onto an inner universe proper to each person.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A crowd-sourced poetry jam dressed up as documentary—it's almost too earnest, the kind of film that makes you roll your eyes at its own sincerity, except the three directors somehow make it *work* by refusing the obvious manipulations. They're not selling us a thesis; they're just listening, which is weird enough to be subversive.
Un mot sits comfortably in the essay film tradition—Varda's *Daguerréotypes*, Kiarostami's street portraiture—but what distinguishes it is the formal restraint: the editing knows when to get out of the way, letting each answer breathe without scoring it, without underlining the profundity. That's curatorial discipline.
The decision to hold on faces *after* the answer lands, capturing the slight exhale or fold back into themselves—that's the technical choice that transforms a premise that could've been gimmicky into something genuinely intimate. Two minutes, no music, just that pause.