Dans la joie et la bonne humeur
2014 · 6m · Belgique
Directed by Jeanne Boukraa
Genres: essay film, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
After scientists discover the key to immortality in a tiny jellyfish and splice its regeneration gene into the human genome, the film traces the stages of a species freed from suffering and death — until, against all expectations, humanity itself faces extinction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's sci-fi that refuses to celebrate its own premise—the immortality payoff gets boring, then horrifying, then moot—which is exactly the kind of subversive genre inversion that makes consensus taste uncomfortable, and that's when you know you're onto something.
Boukraa constructs this as a formal essay film, each stage of humanity's post-immortal arc a carefully composed chapter that situates itself in a lineage of speculative cinema that trusts visual composition over exposition—the kind of rigorous structural thinking that rewards close viewing.
The decision to make the film's true subject not the discovery but the *boredom* that follows—letting tone and pacing flatten into ennui rather than dramatic arc—is the single choice that transforms a high-concept premise into something genuinely unsettling on a micro-budget.
Reviews
la vulnérabilité de l'espèce humaine, fruit de sa génétique, loin d'être un défaut coriace sous-tends au contraire un système de valeur salutaire qui prohibe toute violence et vise au bien-être de tous... Jeanne Boukraa s'y attèle de manière simple et pertinente.