8 MIN
2026 · 2m
Directed by Fanny Colonna d'Istria
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Iva, a 25-year-old director, wakes in hospital after a suicide attempt; her friend Naël realizes he had not understood her messages as a call for help, and together they grasp how invisible distress can be and agree on a way to communicate so as never to face suffering alone again.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes on suicide, recovery, and friendship—sounds like miserabilist YouTube therapy until you realize Colonna d'Istria is deliberately *not* showing you the crisis, just the after, which is either cowardly or genuinely subversive depending on whether the restraint lands.
The film inherits a lineage of post-crisis intimacy cinema (think Dardenne brothers), but 8 MIN risks collapsing under its own earnestness; the question is whether the economy of form—what's *not* dramatized—reads as considered restraint or underdeveloped.
Two minutes is a stranglehold, but the choice to let Naël's realization unfold in silence while he watches Iva sleep—that moment of guilty recognition playing across his face without explanation—does the work of a ten-minute script; it's the kind of casting-and-stillness decision that proves restraint is a craft choice, not a limitation.