à fleur de peau
2026 · 2m
Directed by Elena de Luycker, Mattéo Rotiel
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Alone at home, a woman gets ready to go out, applying her makeup a little at a time — one more touch, one last stroke of the brush.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute loop of makeup application sounds like the opposite of subversive—until you realize the film is asking whether getting ready is ever actually *finished*, which is genuinely unsettling in a way most avant-garde stuff isn't brave enough to sit with.
The restraint here positions itself against the maximalist experimental tradition; there's a lineage of durational cinema and feminist body-work cinema converging, and the formal decision to stay locked on incremental gesture feels both rigorous and aware of its own quietness.
That one choice—letting the camera stay still while the only movement is the micro-adjustments of hand and brush—transforms what could be tedious documentation into something hypnotic; it's the kind of technical discipline that makes two minutes feel like an entire emotional architecture.