Les Nerfs dans l'Os
2026 · 2m · France
Directed by Artur Badurek
Tones: contemplative, tender
Alexia, a young woman living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, endures a punishing routine of heavy medical interventions. On the day she is due a major botox injection to hold her jaw in place, an unexpected development upends her routine in this fact-based fiction.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most films about chronic illness genuflect toward inspiration porn or tragedy; Badurek finds the third thing—the absurd intimacy of routine, the way a Botox appointment becomes the hinge of a life. It's quietly subversive in refusing to *perform* its own stakes.
A formally precise meditation on embodiment and medical time, situated in the lineage of intimate biographical cinema—the kind of restrained, observational work that trusts the viewer's intelligence and the frame's compositional weight.
The reversal lands because of a single editorial choice: the decision to hold on Alexia's face in the moment before intervention, letting us sit with anticipation rather than cut away—that micro-commitment to presence is what transforms a medical scenario into something genuinely moving.