ROOT OUT
2026 · 2m
Directed by Mehdi Sotot, Lucas Serras
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
At the first light of day, a man works the land, immersed in the silence of his thoughts, his gestures precise and soothing — until memories of the previous night resurface and take hold of him, as if something buried deep refused to stay silent.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a guy pulling weeds and having a crisis doesn't exactly scream subversive—it's the kind of hushed, introspective piece everyone expects from a film festival, which means it's probably doing something too safe to bother defending.
ROOT OUT sits squarely in the lyric-essay tradition, where the precision of gesture and the architecture of memory-as-interruption become formal arguments about interiority; Sotot and Serras trust the viewer to hold that tension between meditative labor and psychological rupture without spelling it out.
The real work here lives in whatever they chose NOT to show—the buried thing stays buried, the surrealism stays ambient—and that discipline, that refusal to sensationalize the intrusion, is what makes two minutes of someone at earth level feel like it's about something that matters.