La Mona
2026 · 2m
Directed by Léo Elbé
Genres: biography, comedy, historical
Tones: darkly comic, theatrical, whimsical
Leonard, brilliant at painting but hopeless at diplomacy, refuses to let Mona smile — nobody smiles in painting, except Mona. The film reconstructs, almost faithfully, the conception of the Mona Lisa.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute film that turns Leonardo's neurotic control-freak genius into comedy gold by inverting the entire mythology of art history—the Mona Lisa not as serene masterpiece but as the battleground between an artist's vision and his subject's refusal to obey. This is the kind of premise that makes you wonder why no one thought of it before, and why it shouldn't work but absolutely does.
Elbé demonstrates formal sophistication in compressing the weight of Renaissance portraiture into whimsy without sacrificing the underlying commentary on artistic authority and representation; the film sits gracefully within a lineage of revisionist biographical shorts that interrogate canonical narratives through tonal inversion.
The singular stroke here is the casting choice to play Leonard's frustration as pure, childlike petulance—one actor's complete commitment to that tonal register transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely tender about the impossible negotiation between creator and subject.