Ainsi naissent les tsunamis
2026 · 2m
Directed by Justine Jeannot
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Seventeen-year-old Lilio stays the night at his friend Elliott's; during the night he is sexually assaulted by Elliott's father, and caught in a whirlwind of emotions he struggles against himself and the tsunami overwhelming him.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The tsunami metaphor feels safe—trauma-as-water is exactly the kind of poetic gesture that consensus film criticism eats up, and Jeannot's restraint, while competent, doesn't actually *rupture* anything; it's formally sensitive but thematically tame.
Jeannot's compression of violence and aftermath into two minutes demonstrates the formal precision of the best contemporary French short cinema—the way internal devastation is rendered through visual abstraction rather than narrative exposure places this firmly in a lineage of elliptical, craft-aware trauma cinema that respects the viewer's intelligence.
What elevates this beyond competent is the sound design choice—the way the tsunami roar becomes indistinguishable from psychological noise, collapsing exterior and interior through audio rather than exposition—a decision that transforms a modest premise into something that genuinely *feels* like drowning.