Les Joues Roses
2026 · 2m
Directed by Maëva Dili
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
In the toilets of her high school, Michelle, 17, finds herself facing Nathan, a classmate who makes her uneasy and tries to dominate her; isolated in the closed space, she endures his intimidation before leaving alone and calm, leaving Nathan stretched out in a cubicle behind her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The inversion is clever—a girl alone with a predatory boy in a bathroom stall, and somehow she walks out unshaken while he's the one broken—but it feels like a reversal premise masquerading as subversion, a gotcha rather than genuine provocation.
Dili demonstrates formal control in the spatial constraint and the measured pacing of escalation, positioning the work within a lineage of chamber dramas that use isolation to interrogate power; the restraint of the ending suggests a filmmaking intelligence aware of what understatement can accomplish.
The camera's refusal to cut during the confrontation—holding on Michelle's face as the only register of her interiority—is the decision that makes this work: it trusts performance and proximity over editing tricks, and that trust is what elevates a two-minute provocation into something that lands.