Nourrir les cygnes
2022 · 2m · France
Directed by Christophe Ideal
Genres: experimental, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
A woman steps into her dream by walking on a lobster, where relatives and strangers deliver strange messages from the depths of her unconscious.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A woman literally walks on a lobster into her own unconscious—that's the kind of image-logic that makes you pause and grin because it shouldn't work but somehow does. Ideal leans into the absurdist machinery without winking, which is exactly how you pull off surrealism without suffocating it with whimsy.
The film's formal restraint in service of its dream-logic shows genuine lineage awareness—there's Buñuel's precision in the construction, a respect for Surrealist syntax rather than mere ornamentation. At two minutes, every compositional choice earns its place in the unconscious architecture.
The decision to make the lobster the literal threshold rather than metaphorical decoration—that's the pivot that sells the whole premise; it's tactile and specific enough that the stranger messages from relatives land as intimate rather than merely weird.