La Dispute
2026 · 2m
Directed by Hicham Fliti
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender, tense
A few minutes before the national dramatic arts examination, two candidates, in a whirlwind of anxiety and fragility, form a troubling bond.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two kids in an exam waiting room bonding over existential dread—sounds like a Linklater rehash until you realize Fliti's actually mining something weirder about how vulnerability gets weaponized in high-pressure moments, which most directors would soft-pedal into uplift.
Fliti locates himself in a lineage of intimate psychological portraiture—there's echoes of Haneke's formal restraint applied to adolescent fragility—and the two-minute constraint becomes a curatorial choice that mirrors the exam's own temporal violence.
The entire film hinges on the decision to let the bond form in *silence* rather than dialogue, and that absence—the space where reassurance should go but doesn't—is what makes the tenderness actually unsettling and real.