No Touch Master
2020 · 26m · Francia
Directed by Charles-Antoine Sanchez
Genres: action, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Tony, a heartbroken master of No Touch, a martial technique said to fight without physical contact, must face a terrorist group led by Kane with his reckless partner Jack. The fight revives the demons of his past.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A 26-minute short about a mystic martial artist fighting terrorists should be ridiculous—and it almost is—but Sanchez keeps wrestling it toward something genuinely strange: a meditation on trauma dressed up as action-thriller. It's the kind of film that shouldn't work and almost doesn't, which is exactly why it's interesting.
The tonal architecture here—threading contemplative character work through genre machinery—recalls the disciplined restraint of festival shorts that understand how to earn their emotional weight without announcing it; the interplay between Jack's recklessness and Tony's haunted precision feels situtated in a lineage of character-driven thrillers.
What makes this work isn't the No Touch premise (which could've been gimmicky) but Sanchez's decision to stage the action around stillness and restraint—the film lives in the moments *before* contact, the psychological geometry rather than the impact, and that single formal choice transforms a genre exercise into something urgent and sad.