ISHTAR
2026 · 2m
Directed by Antoine Della Maria, Dejan Ilic
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
Ishtar, goddess of beauty, plays a game of chess against an audacious young girl - with Beauty itself as the stake.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of goddess-versus-girl chess and somehow it dodges every mythic cliché you'd expect—the surrealism lands because it refuses to explain itself, which is exactly the kind of restraint that makes contrarians believe in filmmakers again.
A formally precise meditation on beauty as wager, situtating itself squarely in the lineage of mythic cinema while executing with such measured compositional clarity that the metaphysical stakes feel earned rather than asserted.
The decision to play the entire negotiation through chess—static, geometric, ritualistic—transforms what could've been expository dialogue into pure visual argument, and that formal choice is what makes two minutes feel like a complete philosophical event.