Quelle merveille !
2026 · 2m
Directed by Boris Bégard
Tones: darkly comic, tense
In a single two-minute take, a couple meets their friends' son for the first time, and the encounter does not go entirely as planned: is every truth good to tell, especially to friends, and especially about the apple of their eye?
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute single take about social discomfort and the violence of honesty—sounds like a festival darling, but Bégard actually commits to the awkwardness without winking, which is rarer than it should be.
The single-take constraint situates itself in a lineage of real-time performance cinema (think Rope, think Birdman's spiritual cousins), and the formal discipline serves the moral ambiguity at the heart of the premise rather than upstaging it.
Everything hinges on that moment when someone says the unsayable thing—the choice to not cut away, to let the camera hold on the friends' faces as the temperature shifts, is what transforms a premise about social etiquette into something genuinely unsettling.