Les chaises volantes
2026 · 2m
Directed by Arnaud Huck
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In a cold, silent rest home, Bruno, 59, struggles with a failing body and memory after an emotional shock and waits only to go home; when his daughter Hélène visits, he understands the longed-for moment is slipping away, and she chooses to look at his anger differently.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 2-minute chamber piece about an old man waiting to die—it's almost *too* tasteful, the kind of film that plays it safe with melancholy and tender gestures. But there's something quietly subversive in how Huck lets the daughter's reframing of anger sit without resolution, refusing the easy catharsis we expect from end-of-life drama.
Huck's restraint here is exemplary: the economy of a two-minute runtime forces every formal choice—the silence, the framing of bodies in institutional space, the daughter's gaze—to carry the weight of a Koreeda or Haneke-inflected meditation on care and acceptance. This is craft aware of its lineage, and it earns its place in that tradition.
The pivot happens in how Hélène chooses to see her father's anger not as failure but as something worth witnessing—and Huck makes that shift visible through a single sustained look rather than dialogue or score, which is the decision that transforms this from competent to necessary.