Quand j’ai remplacé Camille
2017 · 7m · Francia
Directed by Leïla Courtillon, Nathan Otaño, Rémy Clarke
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, sports
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Laure must replace a deceased swimmer on a relay team as the qualifiers approach. Consumed by grief and stress, she becomes obsessed with Camille, the swimmer she replaced.
Picked by Zoe
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A grief-haunted relay swimmer obsessing over her replacement sounds like the kind of emotional realism most shorts default to, but there's something genuinely unsettling about how the film lets that obsession *metastasize* without moralizing—it refuses the easy redemption arc and stays in the discomfort, which is rare.
The formal restraint here—shooting pool-side rituals with documentary precision while the interior life splinters—locates itself in a lineage of French cinema attuned to how sport becomes metaphor for mortality and displacement; the editing respects the viewer's intelligence enough to leave gaps.
The decision to keep Camille almost entirely unseen, known only through Laure's fragmented research and the ghost of her times, transforms what could be a standard grief story into something architecturally clever—everything we understand about her comes through indirection and archival traces, and that structural choice is what makes this work.