La Candidate
2026 · 2m
Directed by Inès Brin
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative
At a casting, a candidate is asked: what is beauty? The question obsesses her, but the page stays blank — and her determination may turn out to be the final answer.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A casting-room premise that could've been twee becomes genuinely unsettling — Brin refuses the easy answer and instead lets the blank page *become* the answer, which is the kind of narrative inversion that makes people uncomfortable in exactly the way they should be.
Brin situates this squarely in a lineage of Beckettian silence and the durational cinema of refusal; the formal rigor of letting a two-minute frame hold its breath while a performer grapples with the unanswerable is precisely the kind of economical conceptual filmmaking that defines the contemporary short.
The singular choice here is the decision to never cut away from the candidate's face — letting us watch the micro-performance of thinking itself, of determination collapsing into something harder to name, transforms what could be a philosophy exercise into something that actually *lives* on screen.