La Reine
2026 · 2m
Directed by Élèves de l'Atelier Court-métrage du Lycée Ismaël Dauphin
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, horror
Tones: dark, darkly comic, theatrical
On the very day she is about to be crowned prom queen, a teenager obsessed with her image is violently betrayed by her own body, and her big day turns into a public nightmare.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A lycée student film that takes the prom queen narrative—usually saccharine territory—and yanks it into body horror; the fact that it's *this* irreverent about a girl's public humiliation, made by actual teenagers, is exactly the kind of subversive premise everyone else will sleep on.
The theatrical darkness here recalls a specific lineage of European coming-of-age cinema that treats adolescent embarrassment with operatic weight, though at two minutes the formal precision feels more like a sketch than a fully considered statement.
What makes this work is the restraint—they don't need much budget to execute the core idea, and the choice to keep the runtime punchy means the body-betrayal premise lands without overstaying, which is the kind of structural economy that separates student work that *feels* like student work from student work that actually sings.