HORS-SUJET
2026 · 2m
Directed by Roman Angel
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
Léo, 11, has to hand in an essay — but things do not go as planned, in a film dedicated to all those too often written off as off-topic.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A film about a kid failing at an essay assignment should be aggressively boring, but Roman Angel somehow makes marginalization feel like quiet rebellion—the whimsy here cuts against the grain of predictable coming-of-age beats in ways that feel genuinely subversive rather than twee.
There's a deliberate restraint in how Angel situates this within the essay-film tradition (Vigo, Tati's formal resistance to institutional order), using the constraint of 2 minutes to meditate on what gets deemed 'off-topic' when the real issue is who decides the topic.
In a 2-minute runtime, the crucial move is whether you let the camera stay curious about Léo's tangential thinking rather than punishing it—and Angel's decision to honor the digression instead of correct it is what transforms a school-assignment premise into something genuinely tender and specific.