Gennaro!
2026 · 2m
Directed by Jeff Moine-Maeda
Tones: tense, theatrical
In a café, an actress awaiting an audition dares to rehearse her text with a stranger. What was meant to reassure her escapes her control.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A stranger becomes your scene partner in a café and the whole thing goes sideways—it's a premise that could've been precious, but Moine-Maeda lets it twist into something genuinely unsettling instead of cute, which is the only way this works.
The theatrical rehearsal framing positions this within a lineage of meta-drama, but the execution hinges on precise control of tone and timing—the kind of formal discipline that separates a gimmick from a considered piece.
Two minutes to establish a power dynamic that inverts entirely on a single look or line reading—whatever Moine-Maeda got from the actress in that rehearsal moment is the whole film, and it either lands or it doesn't with surgical clarity.