LA VIE D'UN POT DE CORNICHONS
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alexandre Lambrun
Genres: comedy, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, whimsical
As a young man does his shopping, an unexpected voice tells the story of a simple jar of pickles: an ordinary object lost among so many others, it recounts its life with humour and fragility, jostled and displaced as it observes the human world and questions its place, until its destiny takes an unexpected turn.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A jar of pickles as unreliable narrator-philosopher? Everyone else would've made this precious and sentimental, but Lambrun leans into the genuinely unsettling absurdity of an object mourning its own ordinariness—it's subversive exactly because it refuses to wink at the audience.
The film sits in a lineage of anthropomorphic French surrealism (Vigo, early Tati) while maintaining formal discipline in its two-minute constraint; the voiceover's meditative counterpoint to the visual chaos of a supermarket shows considerable restraint in a genre prone to overstating its whimsy.
The decision to let the pickle jar's existential crisis play almost deadpan against the bustling indifference of the shopping environment—that tonal friction—transforms what could've been a sketch into something genuinely moving on a micro-budget.