Le Témoin
2026 · 2m
Directed by Antoine Cotentin Tricard
Tones: contemplative, tender
Bored in a park, a young man watches a romantic encounter unfold before him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes of a guy staring at other people's intimacy sounds like the kind of passive observation trap most films fall into—but if Tricard actually found something subversive in voyeurism without judgment, that's the exact premise-twist that could make me wrong about my initial eye-roll.
The restraint here—letting tenderness emerge through a third party's gaze rather than inhabiting the couple directly—situates itself deliberately within a lineage of observational cinema, though whether the formal precision justifies the slightness of incident is the question that will get debated.
In 120 seconds, Tricard commits entirely to the witness rather than the witnessed, and whatever single choice anchors that perspective—whether it's a particular cut away from the couple, a sound design decision, or a micro-expression in the young man's face—is probably what transforms boredom into something approaching grace.