JUSTE UN INSTANT
2026 · 2m
Directed by Julien d'Hervilly
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Pauline shares an ordinary moment with her grandfather — a few gestures and silences whose discreet beauty only grows with time.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a grandfather and granddaughter existing in the same room—no conflict, no reveal, no reason to care—and yet d'Hervilly somehow makes restraint feel like an act of resistance. It's so aggressively uninterested in earning your emotion that it almost becomes perverse, which is the only reason I'm not bored.
A disciplined study in negative space and duration that sits comfortably within the Koreeda-Haneke lineage of family portraiture; the film's refusal to score or manipulate the silences between gestures demonstrates a formal maturity that respects both the audience's intelligence and the tradition of contemplative cinema.
What makes this work is the decision to hold on Pauline's face just fractionally longer than feels natural—that tiny lag between her thought and her expression is where the whole film lives, and it's a choice so small and so precise that it transforms 'a moment with grandpa' into something that actually breaks your heart.