A Tiny Tale
2020 · 8m · Francia
Directed by Chloé Bourdic, Maŷlis Mosny, Noémie Halberstam, Sylvain Cuvillier, Théophile Coursimault, Zijing Ye
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
A dog is abandoned at the side of the road; tied to a lamppost, he stays alone until the day he meets an aspiring young astronaut and a professional cyclist who keeps trying to beat her highest score.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Six directors and a dog-meets-astronaut premise that should be treacly garbage, but the film's refusal to sentimentalize abandonment or force uplift is genuinely weird—it trusts the audience to sit in loneliness without rescue fantasies, which most shorts are too cowardly to do.
The ensemble directorship might suggest chaos, but instead there's a careful, almost Koreeda-like restraint in how the film lets mundane moments (a cyclist's routine, a child's solitary play) accumulate weight—the tender whimsy never overwhelms the formal precision of frame and pacing.
What makes this work is the sound design choice—that specific quality of silence and ambient street noise that makes you *feel* the dog's waiting—and the decision to intercut the cyclist's repetitive loop with the child's open-ended wonder, so two completely different rhythms start to rhyme without the film ever explaining why.