Baraka
2026 · 2m
Directed by Hortense Lejolivet
Genres: drama, mystery, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
In the silent expanse of the Moroccan desert, a man crosses paths with an unexpected presence on his road that seems to hide a deeper truth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of desert silence and a mysterious encounter—sounds like exactly the kind of precious, overstuffed allegory that festival programmers mistake for profundity, which means I'm probably wrong and it's actually a sly deconstruction of mysticism hiding underneath.
Lejolivet positions this within a lineage of contemplative cinema—the desert as moral space, the stranger as mirror—and the formal restraint required to sustain mystery across 120 seconds suggests a filmmaker thinking carefully about what silence and negative space can argue.
In a 2-minute frame, the decision to let that 'unexpected presence' remain genuinely opaque rather than resolve into meaning is what transforms what could be a student film into something that trusts the audience's discomfort.