LA TOMATE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Pauline Tessadri
Genres: drama, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, contemplative
During a night shift in a supermarket, a new employee learning the rules of shelving finds his attention caught by a tomato that is not quite like the others.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A tomato as the object of desire in a supermarket labor film could've been precious, but Tessadri commits so completely to the weird that she transcends the premise—this isn't quirk, it's a genuine rupture in the mundane, and that's exactly the kind of subversive gesture everyone else will miss.
The film's restraint and formal discipline—building dread through mise-en-scène and the grammar of supermarket geometry—situates it thoughtfully within a lineage of poetic realism, though the surrealist turn risks undermining its own compositional rigor.
What makes this work is the decision to hold focus on the protagonist's *attention itself* rather than explain the tomato's strangeness—that structural choice, letting the viewer's curiosity mirror his, does more with two minutes and a single prop than most films do with a feature budget.