MÊME HEURE MÊME ENDROIT
2026 · 2m
Directed by Emma Banyuls
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
In a neighbourhood café frozen in time, three friends kill boredom at the same time, same place as always, while Blanche recounts the improbable encounter of the day before with a famous casting director.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A café frozen in time where nothing happens except the recounting of something that almost happened—it's the anti-climax setup every other scout would botch, but Banyuls makes the stasis itself the joke, which is genuinely perverse in a two-minute format.
Banyuls situates herself squarely in the French conversational cinema lineage—Rohmer's café dialogues, Varda's observational stillness—and the formal restraint (three friends, one location, the anecdote as dramatic action) shows a curator's understanding of what minimal means.
The entire film turns on the decision to make the casting director encounter offscreen—all the energy and possibility live in Blanche's retelling rather than the scene itself, and that single structural choice elevates what could've been a sketch into something genuinely bittersweet about presence and absence.