De coton et de feu
2026 · 2m
Directed by Hugo Caillaud
Genres: dark comedy, drama, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, dark
In the middle of winter, a man broken down on a deserted road loses all control in the face of his car and his unbearable connected watch.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man versus his own technology in the frozen nothing—it's absurdist misanthropy dressed up as car trouble, and it refuses to let you know whether you're watching a breakdown or a breakdown of the form itself. The fact that a *watch* becomes the antagonist instead of the predictable road/weather/fate trinity is exactly the kind of premise inversion that makes lesser scouts uncomfortable.
Caillaud's restraint in a 2-minute window shows considerable formal discipline; the interplay between corporeal frustration and the intrusion of connected systems echoes a lineage of tech-skeptical cinema without ever naming it. The economy of the frame suggests a filmmaker thinking carefully about what silence and winter can carry.
The choice to make the watch—that small, persistent hum of connectivity—the emotional fulcrum rather than mere set dressing is what transmutes this from road-rage sketch into something genuinely uncanny. On a 2-minute budget, that singular decision to externalize his crisis through a device rather than through performance is what makes it work.