feline
2026 · 2m
Directed by Hugo Lange
Genres: drama, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In 1944, as the German army assaults a major Resistance stronghold in the Vercors, the gravely wounded Pierre comes face to face with Franz, a very young German soldier just as distraught as he is, and only nature can guide them out of the absurdity of war.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent, sure, but this is exactly the kind of symmetrical humanist war story that gets made every other year—two soldiers, mutual suffering, nature as redemption. Where's the teeth? Where's the thing that makes you *uncomfortable*?
Lange taps into a lineage of intimate war cinema—the Vercors setting anchors it in real Resistance history—and that two-minute constraint forces a formal purity: every frame, every cut has to *mean* something. The tenderness between Pierre and Franz works precisely because it refuses sentimentality.
The decision to let the soldiers' distress mirror each other almost exactly—so that you can't quite tell who needs saving—does the entire thematic work in a 120-second runtime; that structural symmetry is doing something most feature-length war films never achieve.