Reste encore
2026 · 2m
Directed by Anaïs Segalen
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A grieving girl dreams she goes surfing, believing she will find in the ocean an appeasement for the pain left by her father's death; carried by the waves and guided by a phrase he used to repeat, she does not immediately realize it is a dream — and on waking, his voice still resonates in her, revealing the journey was an interior one.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Grief-as-ocean-dream feels like the kind of premise every festival programmer thinks they're tired of, but Segalen's refusal to punch it up or twist it into something clever is almost radical—the restraint itself becomes subversive.
This sits comfortably in the lineage of Romantic dream-logic cinema, from Cocteau onward, and Segalen demonstrates real formal discipline in sustaining the ambiguity between interior and exterior space across a two-minute runtime.
The decision to let the father's voice carry the entire emotional architecture—present only in memory and echo, never shown—is what transmutes a familiar grief narrative into something that actually lands; it's economy as clarity.