À NU
2026 · 2m
Directed by Jessy Venderbure
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tender
Over the course of one night, a couple lets intimacy invade them, united by omnipresent technology; when one suggests transcending the illusion toward a whole, unfiltered love, the other hesitates, and an irreversible choice is made.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup—tech-mediated intimacy as a barrier to 'whole' love—feels like it's been workshopped to death in indie circles, and the film doesn't seem interested in complicating that premise so much as performing it. Subversion requires teeth; this has tenderness, which is its own thing, but not the one I'm hunting for.
Venderbure locates herself in a lineage of digital-age romance cinema (Spike Jonze, Lucile Hadžihalilović's formal restraint), and the 2-minute constraint becomes a formal asset—each gesture weighted, each hesitation a syntax. The restraint is the argument.
That hesitation—the moment one partner pulls back from the unfiltered ask—is everything; it's not shot as resolution or failure but as a genuine perceptual rift, and Venderbure trusts the space between the bodies and the cut to do the emotional work that dialogue would ruin.