Souffle court
2018 · 5m · Francia
Directed by Alessandro Vergonnier, Guillaume Pochez, Jean-Luc Dessertaine, Pierre-Marie Adnet, Tristan Poulain, Vincent Rouziere
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, sports
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
As a Supercross competition approaches, young rider Thomas faces pressure from a father who projects high hopes onto Thomas. Expectation weighs on every lap.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Six directors collaborating on a sports drama about paternal pressure sounds like a recipe for focus-grouped blandness, but the fact that it somehow *works* at five minutes means they found something worth arguing about—just not sure it's subversive enough to keep my attention.
A cleanly composed meditation on expectation and performance; the melancholic register situates it in a lineage of European coming-of-age shorts that understand restraint as formal choice, though the ensemble direction raises questions about authorial clarity.
Six filmmakers pooling their decisions into a single 5-minute frame suggests someone made the hard call to strip the supercross down to pure tension—the choice to let the father's pressure live entirely in Thomas's body and breath rather than exposition is what makes this small film breathe.