KALIPOLIS
2026 · 2m
Directed by Armand Rignault
Genres: drama, essay film, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
In a world emptied of its bearings, two souls meet in the immensity of the desert; their road leads them toward Kalipolis, a place murmured to have once been splendid, past ruins and silence that ask what will remain of our cities if we persist in changing nothing.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of desert pilgrimage toward a mythical city that may or may not exist—it's earnest in the way most essay films are, which means it trades provocation for poise, and that's precisely when I check out.
Rignault channels the meditative landscape cinema of Tarkovksy and late Angelopoulos here, letting silence and compositional depth do the philosophical work; the ruin-to-Kalipolis trajectory reads as contemporary allegory wrapped in classical form, the kind of restraint that rewards a second screening.
The decision to let the desert itself become the third character—holding the frame while the figures move through it like pilgrims in a painting—transforms what could've been abstract into something tactile and lived, and that compositional patience on a two-minute budget is what sells the whole premise.