Il fallait juste lever les yeux
2026 · 2m
Directed by Novella Bastien
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Always late, eighteen-year-old Adam crosses his life absorbed in his phone, never looking at it; when a mishap on an ordinary trip forces him to slow down, far from the urban rush and screens, he rediscovers a beauty he had forgotten.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's the phone-zombie redemption arc we've seen a thousand times, dressed up in French indie clothes—Bastien's doing the exact opposite of subversive by pretending the answer to modern alienation is just... looking up more often.
A cleanly composed meditation on attention and presence that situates itself in the lineage of humanist cinema, though the premise lands a bit soft for the formal sophistication the 2-minute constraint demands.
That forced slowdown works because Bastien commits to it visually—the moment Adam actually stops moving and the camera stays with his stillness instead of cutting away is the entire film, and it's enough.