FRACTURES
2026 · 2m
Directed by Lou Tardy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In a more or less futuristic society, a teacher tries to teach beauty to his pupils — a notion that seems to have disappeared.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A sci-fi parable about beauty as a lost language? That's either pretentious nonsense or genuinely subversive—and I'm annoyed I can't decide which after two minutes, which probably means Tardy's onto something.
Tardy positions this squarely in the lineage of pedagogical cinema—Bresson, Vigo—where the classroom becomes a philosophical arena; the restraint and formal precision here suggest a director aware of what she's inheriting and deliberately choosing understatement over sentiment.
Two minutes to establish that beauty has vanished, and Tardy does it through a single sustained performance choice—the teacher's quiet refusal to perform despair—that transforms what could've been heavy-handed into something genuinely moving.