Adèle et Paul
2026 · 2m
Directed by Clément Tissier
Genres: drama, experimental, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Through painting, silences, and a rose whose petals seem to find their place again, Adèle and Paul's love story builds and undoes itself like a memory, each projecting onto the other as moments answer, invert, and repeat themselves.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A two-minute memory palace that refuses to land on narrative—it's formally precise in a way that most experimental shorts mistake for profundity, but Tissier actually earns the abstraction by treating the rose petals and repetitions as syntax, not decoration.
Tissier positions this work squarely in the lineage of Brakhage's lyrical abstraction and contemporary painterly cinema, where editing becomes brushwork and silence is compositional—the formal discipline of undoing a love story through visual refrain suggests real knowledge of what precedes it.
The decision to let the rose petals return and reset rather than fall away transforms what could be maudlin memory-play into something structurally elegant; that one choice—the loop as shape instead of metaphor—makes every other restraint in the frame feel earned.