Ad Vitam Aeternam
2026 · 2m
Directed by Danaé Solignac, Erlong
Genres: drama, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In the 'Star Beers' factory where he works, a man secretly pursues a strange repair, trying, between industrial routine and dreams of elsewhere, to open a breach toward a forgotten beauty.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A factory worker trying to breach industrial reality toward forgotten beauty—it's surrealism that actually *earns* its strangeness, refusing the obvious metaphor while everyone else is still arguing about symbolism. This is the kind of premise that makes consensus taste nervous, and it should.
Solignac and Erlong situate themselves in a lineage of poetic industrial cinema—Vigo, perhaps Tarkovsky's drone—but the two-minute form disciplines that tradition into something genuinely austere; the editing's restraint is what allows the surrealism to breathe rather than cloy.
In two minutes, they make the decision to hold on the worker's face during the 'breach' moment instead of cutting to spectacle, and that single choice—that commitment to interiority over visual payoff—is what transforms a pretty idea into something that actually *lands*.