“The Red Moon Eclipse”: A Poetic Portrait of Love, Loss, and Legacy

In the International Competition for Documentaries at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film (27 October – 2 November 2025), The Red Moon Eclipse (L’éclipse de la lune rouge, 73’) announced the arrival of a major new voice in nonfiction cinema. The film marks the directorial debut of Belgian filmmaker Caroline Guimbal, previously celebrated for her cinematography in Love According to Dalva, which earned her the 2022 Golden Frog at Camerimage in the Cinematographers’ Debuts Competition.

Premiering in Leipzig, this Belgian French language documentary quickly emerged as one of the festival’s most acclaimed titles. Intimate yet universal, The Red Moon Eclipse is a poetic, emotionally charged homage from a daughter to her dying mother, a meditation on love, memory, and the delicate thread connecting generations: a dying mother, a newborn son, and a daughter navigating between them.

The story begins with two life-changing revelations: Guimbal learns that her mother, Nathalie, has been diagnosed with cancer, and shortly afterward, that she herself is pregnant. Over the next few years, she turns her camera toward her mother, documenting the slow rhythm of illness and the tender coexistence of life and death, resulting in a personal chronicle of loss.

Guimbal films her mother with extraordinary intimacy. Her camera is close, luminous, and patient, listening as much as observing. She integrates family archives, old photographs, and home videos into a visual conversation that feels both spontaneous and composed. Through fragments of daily life and fleeting gestures, she reveals the essence of Nathalie: a woman of quiet strength, poetic sensibility, and disarming warmth.

Beneath this tenderness, however, lies a more complex story. As the film unfolds, Guimbal hints at a darker undercurrent, the history of patriarchal abuse and emotional violence that shaped her mother’s life. Without bitterness, she recalls the men who exploited or mistreated Nathalie, leaving wounds that carried across generations. These reflections emerge gradually, never overwhelming the film but enriching its emotional texture. What could have become accusatory or heavy instead becomes a meditation on endurance, forgiveness, and the quiet heroism of women who survive.

The Red Moon Eclipse is a masterclass in emotional cinematography. Guimbal’s visual sensibility infuses every frame with rhythm and restraint. Her background as a director of photography is evident in her control of light and texture, where each pause and silence feels deliberate. The film’s sound design, shaped in collaboration with Rémi Gérard, and its editing, by Lydie Wisshaupt-Claudel, work in harmony to create a calm, immersive atmosphere. What emerges is visual poetry, cinema that feels tactile and alive. Most viewers, as we in the FIPRESCI jury also felt, were probably deeply touched by it.

The Red Moon Eclipse reaches far beyond a personal, intimate story. It is a film about the universal experience of care, loss, and transmission. It speaks of mothers and daughters, but also of the invisible patterns of history and trauma that flow between them, and the fragile hope of breaking that cycle through empathy and creation.

Awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at Leipzig 2025, The Red Moon Eclipse was widely celebrated as one of the festival’s standout works. Its sincerity, cinematic precision, and emotional resonance make it a remarkable debut, one that situates Guimbal among the most promising new voices in contemporary European documentary.

Guimbal herself describes the film with moving simplicity:

“My mother, Nathalie, will die in two years. My son will be born in nine months.
From the past, a spiral of violence and precarity remains that we still have to decipher.
But also the strength of my mother, and the poetry in her way of being in the world.
By filming her, I learn to see through her eyes.
As death approaches, she heals her life.”

Produced by Need Productions (Anne-Laure Guégan and Géraldine Sprimont) in co-production with CBA, The Red Moon Eclipse is the work of a filmmaker in full control of her craft, directing, shooting, recording sound, and editing her own material.

Caroline Guimbal’s debut transforms intimate pain into luminous cinema, an elegy for a mother, a reflection on womanhood, and the beginning of a promising and profoundly poetic filmmaking journey.

By Saleem Albeik
Edited by Anne-Christine Loranger
Copyright FIPRESCI