Galactica
2026 · 2m
Directed by Théodore Piat
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
To write the character of Galactica, superheroine of a futuristic film, Cassandra faces two male colleagues whose creativity is totally absorbed by the character's exterior beauty, at the expense of the screenplay.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a two-minute film that uses satire as a blade instead of a blunt object, turning the machinery of male gaze and creative mediocrity into its own subject rather than just lecturing us about it. Piat's refusal to make Cassandra a martyr or savior, just a person exhausted by the room's stupidity, is the kind of subversive restraint that makes consensus critics nervous.
Galactica operates within a lineage of workplace satire and feminist critique that stretches back through television and theatre, but its compression into two minutes demands an economy of gesture and dialogue that recalls the precision of Buñuel's shorts. The formal discipline—what Piat chooses to show versus what he lets the audience infer—positions this as a considered intervention rather than a topical one.
The pivot happens in the editing: watching Cassandra's face flatten when one colleague pivots mid-sentence from character depth back to 'but what does she *look* like' carries the entire weight of the film, and it works because Piat trusts that single micro-expression to do what pages of exposition couldn't. That choice—cutting away from justification entirely—is what separates this from a sketch.