SIMPLE
2026 · 2m
Directed by Anthony Rigaud
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A man paints; the film plunges into his daily life, his gestures, his memories and his intimate relationship with art, exploring passing time, denial and the beauty of simple things, until the work he creates becomes the reflection of his life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a film that knows exactly what it is—a meditation on process—and refuses to weaponize that restraint into something flashy or ironic; the refusal to complicate the premise is almost radical, which is fine, but it doesn't quite crack the way a real subversive work does.
Rigaud situates himself in a lineage of essay-films interrogating artistic labor (Vigo, Strand, Wiseman) while maintaining formal discretion; the architecture of memory bleeding into gesture into mark-making is classically constructed and earns its melancholy through compositional patience.
The sound design—how silence and the physical texture of painting (brush on canvas, breath) do the work that narration won't—is what lifts this from precious observation into something that actually moves; that single choice to let the studio breathe is what makes two minutes feel complete.