La boîte
2026 · 2m
Directed by Marie Gleyze, Antoine Lacroix
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Finding yourself beautiful can become a problem; at eight years old, Nina is about to learn it.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute film about a child's relationship with beauty and self-image sounds like after-school-special territory, but Gleyze and Lacroix seem genuinely uninterested in the obvious emotional beats—I'd need to see how they actually subvert the coming-of-age trope here.
The premise sits squarely in a lineage of European coming-of-age work, and at two minutes the formal constraint becomes the story's architecture; what matters is whether the editing and sound design demonstrate the kind of restraint that transforms sentiment into something permanent.
Two minutes to convey a psychological rupture in childhood—the real work lives in a single choice, maybe a performance micro-expression from Nina, or an unexpected sound design moment that reframes what 'beautiful' means; that's where this either collapses or becomes unforgettable.