SHAYAN
2026 · 2m
Directed by Grégoire Levoyet
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A man finds himself alone before a difficult decision he cannot bring himself to assume: abandoning Shayan.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of a guy sweating over whether to ditch someone named Shayan—it's almost aggressively quiet, which I respect, but the premise feels trapped in festival-circuit solemnity when it could be doing something genuinely strange with the moral texture here.
Levoyet constructs a portrait of paralysis through restraint: the compositional stillness, the refusal to sensationalize an intimate rupture, the way the frame holds space for what remains unsaid—this is a film that understands how much weight silence can carry in the tradition of contemplative European cinema.
The entire weight lands on that decision to stay *with* the silence rather than cut away from it, letting the actor's micro-expressions become the entire architecture—a formal choice that transforms what could be melodrama into something genuinely unsettling.