PERSONNE D'AUTRE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Hugo Carrette
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Clara works nights for a telephone service whose mission is to compliment those who need it, comforting strangers with gentleness — until an unexpected call forces her out of her routine and confronts her with a truth she was not ready to hear.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A feel-good premise about a compliment hotline should be aggressively boring, but Carrette's willingness to let the rug get pulled out—to make tenderness complicit in avoidance—actually does something subversive with the warmth instead of just wallowing in it.
The film sits in a lineage of intimate chamber dramas that use constraint (the voice, the single location) to excavate interiority, and the formal discipline of staying within Clara's soundworld until the moment that discipline breaks is precisely calibrated.
The whole film pivots on the decision to keep the camera on Clara's face during that call—to refuse to cut away or contextualize—which transforms what could've been a sentimental sketch into something that actually *costs* her, and us, to witness.