Hello World
2013 · 21m · France
Directed by Rafael Mathé, Etienne Larragueta
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
In a near future where a private company boosts brain capacity at the cost of storing everyone's memory data on a single server, a young woman has the power to change things.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The real subversion here isn't the premise—it's that they actually commit to the *consequence* of centralized memory. Most sci-fi cowards would've chickened out at the existential endgame, but Mathé and Larragueta let it get weird and uncomfortable in ways that make the usual "one person saves the world" plot feel suddenly, radically sinister.
A film acutely aware of its lineage to both cyberpunk and the memory-as-vulnerability tradition; the 21-minute form is disciplined and economical, trusting the visual language of data and interiority to do the philosophical heavy lifting rather than exposition.
The tonal pivot—from techno-thriller setup to something closer to psychological horror—hinges entirely on a single performance choice in the final act that reframes what "power" actually means; that moment of refusal is where the film earns its darkness on a clearly lean budget.