CODA
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alban Sahut
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Once a pianist, now a prisoner of Parkinson's disease, she tries to accept the idea that she may never play again.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a grief film about loss, which is fine, but there's nothing here that subverts the form—just a straightforward woman-can't-play-piano meditation that every other festival is already programming.
Sahut locates the film in the long tradition of performance-disability cinema but executes it with formal restraint: the 2-minute constraint forces every frame toward essential gesture, creating something closer to visual poetry than problem-solving drama.
The decision to frame this through the pianist's hands—watching them fail, remembering them succeed—is the throughline that transforms a familiar premise into something tactile and irreplaceable, though the execution feels slightly larger than the budget allows.