Barber Chope
2026 · 2m
Directed by Valentine Sas, Noémie Ninnin
Luke fancies himself a cowboy; Josie, fed up, invents an entirely different western story for herself.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes and they've already killed the cowboy fantasy—but instead of just deflating Luke's delusion, they let Josie build her own myth, which is the actually subversive move hiding inside what looks like a cute gender-swap joke.
The film understands its debts to the revisionist western and comedy-of-manners traditions, but the execution feels slight; there's formal awareness here, yet not quite the precision that would elevate the premise into something worth programming.
The decision to give Josie's invented narrative equal weight and screen time—not as punchline but as parallel story—transforms what could've been a throwaway gag into something genuinely generative, and that structural choice does all the heavy lifting on a shoestring.