j'irai te chercher
2026 · 2m
Directed by Maïssane Lasga
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Every day Mehdi returns here, his gestures striving to grasp what escapes him; in this fragile ritual he explores the body, time and forgetting, until the ultimate instant reveals what everything seemed to be seeking.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a guy repeating the same gesture until death arrives—sounds like a pretentious snoozefest, except Lasga somehow makes the repetition *matter*, turning ritual into something that actively resists narrative comfort. It's the kind of formally austere move that usually bores me, but here it's genuinely unsettling.
Lasga positions this firmly in the lineage of durational cinema and phenomenological performance—think Bresson's economy meets the body-as-text investigations of contemporary dance film—with an editing precision that lets each iteration breathe without sentimentality. The final reveal earns its weight because the formal restraint preceding it has the rigor of genuine artistic conviction.
The decision to hold on Mehdi's hands across identical frames, letting micro-variations in muscle and shadow accumulate, transforms what could've been conceptual coldness into something tactile and human; that single compositional choice—the closeup that refuses to cut—does all the heavy lifting on a two-minute budget.