La Rose
2026 · 2m
Directed by Lucie Turlan Sestier
Genres: fantasy, romance, sci-fi
Tones: melancholic, surreal, tender
On a desolate planet, the Rose spends yet another night making herself beautiful for the arrival of her pen-pal, who seems to have missed their rendezvous; on the point of wilting, she meets a Star.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A sentient flower waiting for a pen-pal on an empty planet is the kind of premise that sounds like treacly greeting-card schmaltz, but Sestier somehow makes the loneliness *weird* enough to sting—the surrealism actually earns its melancholy instead of just performing it.
Sestier situates this within the lineage of poetic sci-fi shorts that treat alienation as a formal problem—the two-minute constraint becomes the architecture of abandonment itself, each frame a measured study in anticipation and its quiet dissolution.
The decision to make the Rose's self-beautification ritual the entire emotional spine—that obsessive grooming as both hope and countdown—transforms what could be sentimental into something haunting; Sestier understands that constraint forces specificity, and specificity is what makes you believe a flower's heartbreak.