Après la Nuit
2026 · 2m
Directed by Kenzo Piogo, Jonas Martineau
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Achille crosses a violent, silent inner crisis; between disgust with himself, fear of speaking and the pressure of others' gazes, he struggles not to sink, in an exploration of trauma's invisible impact and the difficulty of saying the unsayable.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes of a guy internally collapsing without a single word—it's the kind of restraint most shorts would botch, but Piogo and Martineau refuse the easy catharsis, which means it actually lands.
There's a lineage here—the silent-suffering aesthetic of Bresson, the durational minimalism of contemporary video art—but the execution feels more like homage than argument; competent craft in service of a familiar wound.
The real choice is in what they *don't* cut to: holding Achille's face through the full duration of his unraveling, letting micro-expressions do the labor other films would delegate to sound design or editing tricks—that discipline is what makes two minutes feel like an eternity.