Le Kak !
2026 · 2m
Directed by Emmanuel Degryse
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
Paris, 1891: Faustine, a child with a boundless imagination, learns that a zoo is exhibiting a supposedly hideous and terrifying creature; her curiosity wins out — but what she discovers at the enclosure overwhelms her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A period piece about a kid meeting a creature could be the most forgettable thing ever made, but Degryse somehow subverts the whole reveal-and-awe formula—the real terror isn't the beast, it's the collision between imagination and reality, and that's genuinely unsettling in ways the film doesn't underline.
Degryse draws from a long lineage of French fantastical cinema—Méliès, Vigo—but respects the form by letting restraint do the work; the 2-minute constraint becomes a curatorial choice, each frame deliberate, the emotional architecture precise.
The entire film pivots on a single moment of Faustine's face shifting from wonder to something unnameable, and it's that refusal to tell us what she's feeling—trusting the performance and the cut—that makes two minutes feel like a complete world.