WOMEN CONVERSATIONS
2026 · 2m
Directed by Caroline Soussen
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
In a hotel's toilets, the light exchange of three young women is interrupted by Catherine, 75, whose presence soothes the space; through the memory of a past encounter with another woman — a gaze, a gesture, a kiss — she opens an intimate reflection on beauty and the gaze, bridging two generations of women.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to read this as a gentle intergenerational love story, and yeah, it is—but Soussen's real move is how she uses a bathroom mirror to collapse time and desire into something that refuses sentiment; most scouts would soften it, and that's exactly why I'm suspicious of how much it's working.
The formal restraint here is exquisite—a 2-minute compression of Mulvey and the male gaze flipped into something tender, situated squarely in a lineage of queer cinema that trusts the viewer to read a gaze or a gesture as narrative; this is the kind of film that lives in the edit, each cut a considered argument about beauty and time.
The decision to let Catherine's memory interrupt the present conversation without explaining it, trusting the visual grammar of a look or a hand gesture to do the emotional work—that's what transforms what could be greeting-card intimacy into something genuinely affecting on nothing but close observation and restraint.