J'voudrais être moche comme elle
2026 · 2m
Directed by Adèle Esposito
Tones: darkly comic, provocative
In an ordinary casting session, actors and actresses wait to learn whether they are good enough — and beautiful enough — to match the casting director's search.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most casting shorts genuflect to the industry's cruelty; this one corners it, turns it inside out, and makes you complicit in the laugh—the real subversion is that you want to keep watching the humiliation. Esposito's premise doesn't just flip the power dynamic; it dissolves the line between satire and documentary, which is exactly the kind of unresolvable discomfort contrarians live for.
The film's formal restraint—the waiting room as theater, the casting brief as dramatic text—recalls the Brechtian tradition of exposing institutional machinery through minimal gesture; Esposito's two-minute runtime and refusal of sentimentality anchor what could've been cheap commentary into something closer to structural critique.
The decision to hold on the actors' faces as they absorb the casting director's criteria—that specific, uncut moment of recognition—does all the work: no narration, no edit tricks, just the performance of people realizing they're being valued as objects, and that single choice elevates what's fundamentally a one-room premise into something with real weight.