FACES
2026 · 2m
Directed by Robin Condamin
Genres: drama, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, dark, mythic
In a post-collapse world where human expression has become too costly, three Nomads cross the desert with their faces hidden — until they discover a forbidden relic, a human face, whose bearer becomes almost divine and tears the group's balance apart.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A post-collapse world that bans human faces is exactly the kind of premise that makes everyone else nervous—which means Condamin's already won half the battle. The fact that a forbidden *face* becomes a god-object that implodes a group's hierarchy is subversive enough to sting, and in two minutes he doesn't blink or apologize for the weirdness.
Condamin situates this in a lineage of mythic sci-fi that understands ritual and the sacred—there's Tarkovsky's deliberation here, a formalist's patience with what hiding/revealing means. The economy of gesture across 120 seconds, the restraint in not explaining the theology, marks a filmmaker aware of what cinema can do that exposition cannot.
The single choice that makes this work is the decision to keep the faces obscured until that moment of discovery—it's a sound design and blocking choice as much as a visual one, and it means when the relic appears, the *absence* we've been sitting with suddenly has weight. In a 2-minute short with minimal budget, that restraint is what transforms premise into mythology.