1950
2026 · 2m
Directed by Bruno Juminer, Yannis Nivault
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
In the 1950s, five characters - an African student, a Parisian bourgeois, a pre-yeye English rocker, a mature Austrian and a Belgian nun - each face their reflection in moments of solitude and daily gesture, each embodying a different way of approaching beauty: doubt, resistance, control, bravado or interiority.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Five archetypes staring at mirrors sounds like the kind of earnest continental exercise everyone expects, but Juminer and Nivault refuse to let it settle—the premise keeps threatening to collapse into something weirder, which almost saves it from its own good intentions.
A formally rigorous essay on beauty across cultural and temporal specificity, anchored in the Bazinian tradition of the long take and the revelatory gesture; this is exactly the kind of controlled, lineage-aware work that rewards slow attention and repays argument.
The entire film hinges on the editing rhythm between each character's solitary moment—how the cuts refuse to feel like cuts, letting each reflection breathe just long enough that you forget you're watching montage—and that invisible structural choice is what makes two minutes feel like a full meditation.