Fish & Chicks
2016 · 19m · France
Directed by Julie Grumbach, Elise Mc Leod
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, romance
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
When a boy answers a joke scribbled on a school desk, a girl replies — and their anonymous written exchanges become a suspended, flirtatious game of hide-and-seek across the classroom.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a love story told through *writing* in a classroom—which should be insufferable—but the directors somehow weaponize constraint into genuine tension, making the banality of desk-scribbling feel like underground correspondence; I'm annoyed at how much it works.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of epistolary romance and visual minimalism, with each cut between anonymous exchanges calibrated to sustain longing without resolution—formally composed, if somewhat familiar in its tender geometry.
The genius move is treating the written word itself as the primary visual medium: each scrawled note becomes a close-up performance, and the editing rhythm that holds on handwriting just long enough for us to *feel* the hesitation before a response—that's the film's entire architecture, and it's irreplaceable.