Le sculpteur
2026 · 2m
Directed by Daphné Trh
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, tense
To avoid returning to his old life, Victor must make his work succeed; obsessed with perfection and confronted by the gaze of others, he pushes his creation — and himself — to their limits.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute anxiety spiral about artistic perfectionism sounds exactly like the kind of earnest character study everyone's tired of — except Trh somehow makes the obsession itself *formal*, turning Victor's neurosis into the film's actual structure, which is genuinely disorienting in a way that works.
Trh understands the lineage of the artist-at-work film — the sculptural close-up, the meditative duration — but what distinguishes this is the precision with which the gaze of others becomes a formal constraint on the frame itself, a deliberate tightening that echoes the subject's own paralysis.
The real move here is how Trh lets the *sound* of the work — chisel, friction, breath — do the emotional lifting instead of leaning on performance; two minutes of tactile material detail and mounting silence that somehow feels like a character study without needing a face.