Le concours
2026 · 2m
Directed by Léonard Magnier
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tense
Thomas, whose passion is photography, sees a poster for a contest for the most beautiful photo of his city and wants to enter, facing several participants, including Ben, another young man who becomes his enemy and has already won several contests.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A photo contest as the battleground for two young egos—it's the kind of premise that sounds thin until you realize it's actually about visibility, validation, and the violence of being seen as second-best; Magnier gets there in 2 minutes, which is either restraint or just good luck.
The formal architecture here is deliberate: a competition film that understands its debt to sport-drama and bildungsroman, built on clean lines of rivalry and the question of what makes an image 'beautiful'—it's modest but aware of its tradition.
The whole thing lives or dies on whatever Magnier chose to show us in Thomas's photographs versus Ben's, and if that visual choice actually makes the hierarchy feel unfair rather than earned, this becomes something rare: a coming-of-age that questions taste itself rather than just ambition.