Grive
2026 · 2m
Directed by Loane Simon
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Dragged by her mother to beauty pageants all her life, Lorna, twelve, is a lost girl whose childhood has been stolen; she crosses paths with Agathe, her eternal rival, likewise a prisoner of the world of sequins and glitter.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The pageant-kid-as-prisoner angle feels like it's been wrung dry by now—what keeps this from being another sentimental abuse narrative is the symmetry between Lorna and Agathe, two girls recognizing themselves as co-conspirators rather than enemies, which Simon plays with enough restraint to avoid the expected redemption arc.
Simon's two-minute structure mirrors the compressed, ritualized world of pageantry itself—the editing and framing acknowledge a lineage of coming-of-age films that examine performance and identity, but the formal choice to treat the rival relationship as mutual entrapment rather than conflict gives it genuine thematic weight and formal precision.
The turning point lives entirely in a single exchange of looks between Lorna and Agathe, a micro-performance choice that transforms them from competitors into witnesses of each other's loss—it's the kind of silent, economical acting decision that justifies the entire two-minute runtime and proves you don't need dialogue or elaborate blocking to crack open a story.