GRIMACES
2026 · 2m
Directed by Arthis Billon
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, satire
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, theatrical
In a world where draughts freeze people's grimaces and turn them into pariahs, the grimaced faces take advantage of fashion week to exact their revenge: time for the world to change its face.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise that actually makes you stop and think—frozen grimaces as a literal class system, fashion week as revolution—this is the kind of subversive, weird-for-a-reason concept that most scouts would pass on, and that's exactly why it works.
Billon's theatrical staging and surreal logic feel indebted to a lineage of absurdist cinema, though the execution stays just slightly too on-the-nose to achieve the formal precision this premise demands.
The decision to compress an entire social commentary into 2 minutes through costume and facial performance rather than exposition—that's the specific constraint that forces this film to earn its concept in pure visual storytelling.