Daria
2026 · 2m
Directed by Pauline Noukaz
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Daria crosses her day under the weight of the eyes that judge her, the remarks clinging to her skin — until from this intimate fracture another version of herself is born, shaped by her own perception, in a modern fable about the weight of norms and the gaze of others.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute meditation on the male gaze dressed up as magical realism—competent, yes, but it's treading well-worn ground (dissociative self-fracture as feminist awakening) without the formal violence or narrative twist that would make it genuinely unsettling.
Noukaz demonstrates a careful understanding of how cinema materializes interiority—the doubling device sits comfortably in a lineage from *Persona* to contemporary body-horror feminism—though the execution feels more competent than revelatory.
The specificity lives in how Noukaz uses negative space and stillness to make the 'other self' feel like a subtraction rather than addition—that formal restraint in a two-minute window is what separates this from the dozen other self-fracture shorts circulating.