QUELLE EPOQUE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Maëlie Guillet-Dauphiné
Genres: dark comedy, drama, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
In a not-so-distant future, a government machine eliminates every threat to the nation's peace and anyone showing negative emotions; when his best friend falls under the laser, Sasha realises he no longer lives in the golden age he believed in.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute totalitarian laser-state that kills your friend and calls it peace—most scouts see dystopia, I see a filmmaker laughing while the machine hums. Guillet-Dauphiné refuses the obvious grief beat and leans into the absurdist horror of a guy realizing his golden age was a lie, which is exactly the kind of premise that makes committee programmers squirm.
The film sits comfortably in the lineage of Kiarostami's formal constraint and contemporary European sci-fi allegory, with a restraint in its visual language that respects both the two-minute form and the weight of its political statement. The editing holds back from melodrama—it trusts the premise to do the work.
The single choice here is the laser itself: not a weapon, not a tool, but a casual apparatus of state function, and that one shift in how it's framed and used transforms what could be heavy-handed into something genuinely unsettling on a 2-minute budget.