Premiered in the Perspectives Competition at the Berlin International Film Festival 2026, Forest High marks the feature debut of Belgian filmmaker Manon Coubia and a decisive new chapter in her long-standing exploration of mountain landscapes. Set in a remote Alpine refuge and unfolding across four seasons, the film follows three women who take turns tending the hut. Hikers pass through, stories surface and dissolve, and each guardian confronts her own form of solitude. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary, Coubia keeps the refuge open to real visitors, allowing chance encounters, shifting weather, and lived time to shape the narrative. Shot on 16mm with natural light and built around an intricate soundscape gathered over months, Forest High is less a drama than an immersion, a meditation on precarious labor, female aloneness, collective memory, and ecological disappearance. In this conversation, Coubia reflects on filming as a ritual, on the ghosts embedded in Alpine territory, and on why the mountain remains, for her, both a refuge and a question.

You invited actors to live in the refuge and kept the door open to real passers-by, allowing fiction and documentary to constantly contaminate each other. Can you describe a moment when this porous process fundamentally changed a scene or a character’s trajectory? 

Firstly, we adjusted the scenes according to the weather, which in the mountains can change very quickly. In the second part, the warden becomes worried about a (fictional) family who haven’t arrived. The weather is bad. She shares her concern with four local men who are playing themselves. They speculate about what might have happened. While we were shooting the scene, a family arrived soaking wet from the village down below. We added them into the scene, and it created this misunderstanding where we think we’re seeing the lost family arrive — but it’s not them. There are also scenes where people wander into the frame while we’re filming. When the second warden is fixing a leak, the neighbor opens his window and starts commenting on the scene. The refuge wasn’t just a film set; it had to remain a functional space and continue fulfilling its role. I myself sometimes wore two hats: warden and director.

The three women’s solitudes are very different, shaped by class, age, and life experience: Anne’s economic precarity, Hélène’s long-term instability, Suzanne’s “luxury of time and choice.” How did you direct the actresses so that these social differences could be felt in tiny gestures, silences, and ways of working? 

Their differences were highlighted through very subtle details. Their relationship to food, the way they occupy their «  time of one’s own » and their relationship to the mountains as well. For exemple, the first guardan keeper is never in a state of contemplation; she simply pauses briefly when she returns to the forest of her childhood. Clothing also plays a role: The shared “uniform” is not worn in the same way — the everyday sweater becomes a night sweater for the last one. These are both clues to their social classes and to their different ways of inhabiting solitude. The first two are precarious workers; their relationships are often functional and efficient. The last one is undertaking a kind of retreat. She has a different relationship to time, to space, and to others. She is available.

You chose to shoot in film on 16 mm with natural light and a restrained, tripod-based camera, and to build a rich soundscape over the course of the seasons. How did this slow, ritualized way of filming and recording help you to “sanctify time” and convey the film’s very particular experience of duration and waiting? 

I have always shot on 16mm, so over time it has also become a kind of working habit, almost a reflex. I think the exact moment of filming benefits from the magic of light being imprinted onto the material, and it creates a kind of communion between the crew and what is unfolding in front of the camera. It also forces us to do very few takes, which makes the risk-taking even more intense. Yes, we can speak of a kind of sacralization of the act. Filming is not insignificant. To film is to fix something forever. To wrest something from someone else. There is a form of violence in that too — one that we both intensify and trivialize at the same time now that we can film with a single click and unlimited storage. Film stock reminds us of this. And then there is the time of development. The image is not given to us immediately. I find this latency very beautiful as well. There is still an entire chemical process that keeps the image uncertain until the very end. Again, a matter of time. Recovering a slower sense of time. Giving meaning to things,  anything but consuming.

Can you say something about the sound in the film? 

Yes, there is of course a particular care given to sound. The film is also an immersion through sound. Each season has its own “music.” The seasons tell these transitions — the arrival of the animals at the alpine pasture, for example, with the bells filling the entire off-screen soundscape day and night, even seeping into the character’s dreams. These are live, real sounds. We composed with them. Then there are the small sounds we went out to “gather” one by one to convey the murmurs of the refuge. When winter comes and empties the place, the silence fills with all those creaks and presences that, in the same movement, suggest the refuge’s ghosts. In this final part, there are fifteen minutes of learning to inhabit the silence: the actress familiarizes herself with the sounds of the refuge. She slowly enters into contact with them — all the way to the faint rustling of a small animal hidden within the refuge’s walls.

A very particular bird is playing a role. Can you say something about this scene?

The film summons an endemic bird that has now disappeared from this region: the capercaillie. Its disappearance is directly linked to climate issues and to human overactivity in these once-preserved mountain environments. The film offers it one final courtship display.

Thank you for the interview.

CAST: Salomé Richard, Aurélia Petit, Anne Coesens, Arthur Marbaix, Yoann Zimmer, Alba Rincon Gille, Jean-Claude Duret, Jean-Pierre Jacquier, Michel Besson.

DIRECTOR: Manon Coubia SCREENPLAY: Manon Coubia CINEMATOGRAPHY: Robin Fresson SOUND: Aline Huber, Vincent Nouaille and Samuel Mittelman EDITING: Théophile Gay-Mazas ORIGINAL SCORE: François Chamaraux PRODUCERS: Jérémy Vander Haegen, Nicolas Rincon Gille, Manon Coubia, Tom Durand-Bonnard, Katia Khazak, Charlotte Vincent PRODUCTIONCOMPANY: TheBlueRaincoat(BE)-Aurorafilms(FR) COPRODUCERS: CBA(BE) INTERNATIONAL SALES: Rai Cinema International Distribution