A REEAL WORLD
2026 · 2m
Directed by Thibault Bernard
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In the silence of a living room, Reels scroll by on a screen; the algorithmic flux captures, envelops, and hypnotizes, redrawing without noise our relationship to the real.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a essay film about algorithmic capture that doesn't wink at its own irony—doesn't lean on the easy 'phones bad' thing—which is almost refreshing, but it also doesn't quite go far enough into the genuinely weird places where attention and reality fracture; feels more like a well-made PSA than the subversive gut-punch it could be.
Bernard's two minutes sit squarely in the lineage of structural essay cinema—Farocki, Harun Farocki's video essays—where form mirrors content, and the scrolling Reels become both subject and formal constraint; the restraint and silence are curatorially precise, the kind of disciplined formal choice that earns its contemplative mood.
The decision to let the Reels scroll in near-total visual silence, with only the algorithmic hum underneath, is the entire film—it's the single sound design choice that transforms what could be a tract into something hypnotic and unsettling, and on a two-minute budget that choice *is* the craft.