REFLETS
2026 · 2m
Directed by Mathilde Guerder
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A young woman discovers her reflection for the first time and tips into a world of images that overwhelm her; lost before norms and gazes, she tries to find herself again.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A coming-of-age story about discovering your reflection should be unbearably earnest, but Guerder actually commits to the surrealist slip—she doesn't wink at it, which is precisely why it works when everything else would crumble into pretension.
Guerder positions herself in a lineage of mirror-as-threshold cinema (Cocteau, Tarkovsky's formal meditations on identity), and the two-minute constraint forces a rigor that lesser directors would waste on exposition rather than pure image-thought.
The decision to let the reflection *overwhelm* rather than clarify—layering and fragmenting the image instead of revealing a coherent self—is the technical and emotional choice that transforms a familiar premise into something that actually lands in the gut.