MARIANNE(S)
2026 · 2m
Directed by Ndioro Thiam
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Marianne, a young artist accustomed to excelling in her field, has lost confidence in the beauty of what she makes by letting the outside world influence her inner gaze; the film describes a conversation between Marianne and herself.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute essay on artistic self-doubt feels like exactly the kind of sincere, inward-facing film that bores me—until you realize Thiam's actually turned introspection into a formal argument, making the medium itself the message about how we fracture ourselves for external approval.
Thiam situates this squarely in the essay-film tradition—contemplative, formally aware of its own brevity—and the restraint here, the refusal to resolve Marianne's crisis, places it in deliberate conversation with the fragmentary self-portraits of modernist cinema.
The entire film hinges on a single sound design choice: the way Marianne's voice splits and overlaps with itself, creating this uncanny doubling that doesn't need explanation—it *is* the loss of confidence, made audible in one elegant production decision that costs nothing and says everything.