Best before end...
2014 · 15m · France
Directed by Nicolas Fogliarini
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
François, 65, lives alone in his humble flat with no one to talk to — except a pigeon that lands on his window from time to time — in this quiet drama based on true events.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A lonely old man and a pigeon — on paper, this is exactly the kind of precious indie miserabilism that makes me want to scream, but Fogliarini's refusal to sentimentalize either the man or the bird, and his willingness to let silence be the actual subject matter, is quietly radical in a way most 'experimental' films could never pull off.
The restraint here is extraordinary: a 15-minute portrait of quotidian loneliness that recalls the patient formalism of late Bresson or Kiarostami, where the window frame becomes both barrier and threshold, and the pigeon functions as a formal motif rather than a metaphor—this is cinema aware of its own tradition and honest about what duration and stillness can accomplish.
The singular choice that makes this work isn't the premise—it's Fogliarini's decision to shoot the pigeon and the man in fundamentally different registers, one naturalistic and one almost painterly, so that their co-existence on screen feels like a genuine collision between two ontological spaces, achieved on what was almost certainly a minimal budget.