Scriptionary
2026 · 2m
Directed by Émile Biegel
Genres: comedy, fantasy, historical
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, whimsical
Azem, a traveler from the Orient, recounts his tales before copyist monks so they can transcribe a strange animal — but drawing blind proves a complicated exercise.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A medieval scriptorium comedy about the impossibility of transcription—there's a genuinely perverse pleasure in watching blind copyists fail at their one job, and Biegel gets that the whole conceit is built on subverting what we expect from 'faithful record-keeping.'
Scriptionary sits confidently in the lineage of Bresson and Vigo's playful treatments of labor and representation, mining absurdist tension from a formally precise constraint—the blind transcription becomes both visual gag and essay on the limits of documentation itself.
The decision to keep the animal perpetually unseen, forcing the monks' hands (literally and interpretively) to do the heavy lifting, transforms a two-minute runtime into something that lands entirely on the specificity of that single formal choice—economy as elegance.