El último de los últimos
2018 · 8m · Francia
Directed by Patrice Guillain
Genres: drama, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Watching the news, the more-than-hundred-year-old Simon Rosenberg realises it is the centenary of the First World War and wonders whether he may be its last survivor, so he decides to come forward and speak to the press.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A centenarian WWI survivor making a media spectacle of himself? It's almost too on-the-nose about how we've turned history into content—which would be brilliant if the film trusted that discomfort instead of wrapping it in melancholy respectability.
Guillain situates this in a lineage of witness testimony cinema, where the formal restraint of watching an elderly man confront the archive of his own century becomes the film's ethical weight; the centenary conceit functions as both historical punctuation and formal constraint.
The decision to keep the camera on Rosenberg's face as the news cycles past him—letting the audio do the temporal work while his expression stays nearly still—is what transforms a conceptual premise into something genuinely haunting and singular on a shoestring.