Derniers instants
2026 · 2m
Directed by Lionel Veyrat-Durebex
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A father suffering from cancer uses the little time he has left to live to remember the good memories he shared with his son.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes on a dad with cancer remembering his kid—it's the kind of premise that makes you wince before you've even pressed play, and Veyrat-Durebex walks right into it without flinching or winking. I respect that he doesn't subvert the sentiment; he commits to the tenderness so completely it almost becomes radical.
Derniers instants sits squarely in the lineage of European intimate cinema—think the restraint of Koreeda or early Haneke—where formal decisions about what to show and withhold become the entire moral argument. Two minutes to earn something most films need forty minutes to justify; that's the kind of edit I want to see defended at breakfast.
The film's anchor is probably a single choice—how close the camera stays to the father's face, or the exact rhythm of when memory cuts in—that makes the difference between maudlin and genuine; whatever Veyrat-Durebex did with framing or sound design in that tight window, it's the thing that works.