Je(ux)
2026 · 2m
Directed by Loubna-Oumeïma Ameqrane
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
In the privacy of her bathroom, 25-year-old aspiring actress Leïla rehearses in front of her mirror, chaining emotions between reality and play, removing her makeup and recentring — a look at the invisible work of an actress, far from the spotlight.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's obsessed with the actress-as-subject angle lately, but Ameqrane actually subverts it—she's not performing vulnerability for us, she's documenting the unglamorous labor of *becoming*, which is almost hostile to voyeurism. The mirror work could've been navel-gazing; instead it's a quiet middle finger to the spotlight thing.
There's a lineage here—Varda's self-documentation, Akerman's durational intimacy—but Ameqrane stakes her claim through formal restraint: the editing honors the rehearsal's rhythms rather than imposing narrative shape, and that patience feels earned, almost liturgical in its attention to the work of recentering.
The decision to show her *removing* the makeup between emotional rehearsals—that's the hinge—because it reframes the whole thing from performance-as-mask to performance-as-resetting, and in a two-minute essay that choice does all the heavy lifting, turning a bathroom mirror into something philosophically coherent on almost no resources.