CELA AUSSI PASSERA
2026 · 2m
Directed by Léo Soumah
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In his squat, Ousmane, a twenty-five-year-old Guinean craftsman, confronts an absence: his smile, which he can no longer find in the mirror; between scavenged gold and an improvised forge, each transformation of the metal engages far more than craftsmanship.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute essay-film about a Guinean craftsman's smile vanishing into the forge—it's genuinely weird and refuses the expected poverty narrative, instead collapsing the personal into the material, the spiritual into the metallurgical. Most scouts would fumble this; it's precisely the kind of oblique emotional algebra that shouldn't work but does.
Soumah's film sits consciously in the lineage of essay cinema and the essay-documentary hybrid, treating the mirror, the forge, and the body as formal arguments rather than mere settings; the melancholic surrealism is precisely calibrated, each image a considered intervention in the grammar of African portraiture.
The decision to photograph the gold transformations as a literal mirror for psychological absence—to make the craftwork the actual engine of introspection rather than backdrop—is the kind of single formal choice that elevates modest means into something you can't stop thinking about.