Forest High by Manon Coubia

A film by Manon Coubia

With: Anne Coesens, Salomé Richard, Aurélia Petit

In the northern Alps, Anne, Hélène and Suzanne take turns looking after a mountain hut. Through the seasons, hikers come and go. Stories bloom and fade, leaving each of them facing the silence of their chosen solitude and the poetry of nature.

Our rate : ★★★★

Forêt ivre is undoubtedly one of our favorites from this year’s Berlinale, and even more so from the Perspective selection. The jury made the right choice in awarding it a special mention. (Interview to follow). The film weaves together three bittersweet portraits of three women in the same place, a mountain refuge, in a short period of time (each in her own season). It skillfully seeks to tell us something universal, probably feminine, that cuts across destinies that are both ordinary and marginal. It questions the relationship to the place, a mountain refuge, its history, which sometimes reflects the personal history of its guests. Characters in transit, or wandering for some, brought together by circumstance, forced to talk to each other and open up to one another with simplicity and comfort. With a very refined approach, Manon Coubia, perfectly assisted by her three excellent actresses Anne Coesens—with whom the director is working for the first time—Salomé Richard and Aurélia Petit—with whom she has already collaborated in her previous short films— but also by her male characters (one of whom is played by Yoann Zimmer, also seen in her previous works), touches us with her meticulousness, her kind and calm gaze, her appropriate rhythm, and her ability to transform little things into a breath of hope, into driving forces for future healing, and her ability to bring out personalities with depth. From this suspended time, this moment of transition (the film reminds us as much of Christian Petzold‘s Transit as it does of Akerman attempts), this triple portrait that could be just one (that of Manon Coubia), a gentle melancholy naturally emerges in its first introspective moments, which gradually, mechanically and fluidly gives way to a return to society, to life, to openness, somewhat like Nature itself.