DOA
2026 · 2m
Directed by Basile Vallet-Petit
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
In a world ravaged by war, a survivor pursues a strange quest to make beauty be reborn where everything seems desolate.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A post-apocalyptic beauty-quest sounds like the kind of earnest prestige thing that puts me to sleep, but if Vallet-Petit actually subverts the 'hope among ruins' trope instead of genuflecting to it, I'm listening.
Two minutes of mythic restraint—this is precisely the kind of formally considered work that sits in dialogue with the European art-film tradition, where melancholy and visual abstinence become moral positions rather than aesthetic choices.
In 120 seconds, the entire weight rides on whatever single visual or sonic decision Vallet-Petit made to convince us that beauty-making matters in desolation; I need to see what that choice was.