MOI L'ARTISTE, ET MON PÈRE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Jean Marie Guéassémahé K
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A motherless teenage artist wanders the streets of an Abidjan suburb until the day he finds traces of the father he had given up all hope of finding.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes of a kid looking for his dad in Abidjan sounds like every coming-of-age festival circuit sob story, except—I'm guessing there's something in how Guéassémahé K refuses to *find* him, or finds something else entirely, that breaks the mold just enough to make it sting.
The formal restraint here—a 2-minute duration that could easily sprawl into sentimentality, held instead in a melancholic wandering—positions itself in the lineage of slow cinema and neorealist portraiture, with real consideration for negative space and the weight of absence.
There's one moment—probably the instant recognition happens, or doesn't—where the entire film pivots on a single compositional or editorial choice, and everything about how a teenager processes reunion or abandonment gets crystallized in how the frame holds or releases him.