Collector
2019 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Kassia Ward
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Two travellers encounter a young man on the highway who behaves as if no one can see him, probing how people act in semi-private spaces when they forget they are watched.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A one-minute existential prank that turns the panopticon inside out—what if the watcher is the one erased? Ward's premise demolishes the usual power geometry of surveillance and leaves you suspended in genuine unease, which is exactly the kind of conceptual sucker-punch that makes the obvious stuff look pedestrian.
Formally austere and philosophically rooted in the lineage of cinematic phenomenology, from Bresson's attention to mundane gesture to contemporary expanded cinema's play with presence and absence; the restraint here—minimal dialogue, durational patience—situates it within a rigorous tradition of experimental observation.
The entire film hinges on a single directorial choice: letting the camera hold on the travellers' faces the moment they process the impossible absence, playing it straight rather than winking at the surrealism, and that commitment to deadpan psychology in miniature is what sells the whole uncanny premise.