EN CHAIR OCCUPÉE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Shanna Bendjoya
Genres: essay film, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
Immersed in a body attacked from within by the idea of beauty, injunctions turn into symptoms: what was meant to stay abstract becomes physical as the flesh reacts, rejects and tears — beauty shown not as an ideal but as ingested violence.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Beauty as *ingested violence*—a premise so deliberately repulsive it makes every other body-horror short look like a greeting card. Bendjoya doesn't just reject the ideal; she makes you watch it metabolize into something that tears you from the inside, and yeah, I'm absolutely here for it.
There's a lineage here—Cronenberg's body poetics, Leatrice Eiseman's color theory writing, the essay film's tradition of abstraction-made-flesh—but Bendjoya commits fully to formal disgust rather than critical distance, which keeps it from achieving the considered rigor it's reaching for.
The decision to make injunctions *physical*—to literalize the violence of beauty standards through bodily rejection rather than monologue—is where the whole thing lives; on a 2-minute budget, that translation from conceptual to visceral is what makes it work.