BEAUTIFUL SMILES
2026 · 2m
Directed by Grâce Libissa
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tense
In a luxury hotel, employees Thaïs and Nala are dropped from a communication photo shoot for lacking the approved kind of smile; when Théo, the owner's son and Thaïs's secret lover, defends the decision in the name of artistic direction, Thaïs must choose between keeping her place and keeping her integrity.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise dangles a juicy class-and-desire knot—lover defends the system that degrades his lover—but two minutes isn't enough oxygen for Libissa to let it breathe into something truly subversive; it plays the notes instead of detonating them.
Libissa positions this within a lineage of workplace dignity cinema, and the formal choice to literalize exclusion through the photograph's frame-within-frame is elegant, though the resolution risks sentiment over the harder formal logic the setup demands.
That moment when Théo's defense lands—the specific way Thaïs's face closes rather than breaks—is the whole film; Libissa trusts a performer's micro-choice to carry the moral weight instead of spelling it, and it's the difference between watching complicity and feeling it.