Mission Beauté
2026 · 2m
Directed by Julien Page
Genres: experimental, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
The mission is simple: compose a rhythm after analyzing the beauty of the world — but that was without counting the Cybermancer's secret plans.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2-minute sci-fi poem that derails its own premise halfway through—the Cybermancer sabotage is the whole joke, and Page knows we're expecting uplift, so he gives us bewilderment instead. This is the kind of thing festivals program at 11pm and argue about for three days.
Page situates this in the lineage of experimental short cinema where worldbuilding dissolves into abstraction; the formal restraint—holding to that 2-minute constraint while introducing competing narrative threads—marks a considered hand aware of what brevity can do.
The pivot from 'compose a rhythm' to 'the Cybermancer ruins everything' works entirely because of a single sound design choice that reframes the whole thing as comedy rather than melancholy—a decision that costs nothing but changes everything.