Sourire 3025
2026 · 2m
Directed by Joshua Bénéteau
Genres: dark comedy, satire, sci-fi
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
January 10, 3025: a government radio address wakes citizens with advice for the day, reminding them that beauty keeps the troubles of daily life at bay — smile, whatever you do or wherever you are, and do not forget: your radio is the radio that listens to you.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute authoritarian fever dream that weaponizes wellness rhetoric—the premise alone (smile or else, your radio watches you back) is the kind of "wait, WHAT?" inversion that makes everyone else nervous and makes me certain it's exactly right. Bénéteau takes the most exhausted sci-fi trope (Big Brother) and rewires it through the banality of a morning PSA, which is genuinely subversive.
The formal economy here is precise: a government radio address as pure form, stripped of visual excess, letting the dialogue do the ideological work—there's a lineage to this restraint, from Godard's contempt for narrative comfort to contemporary sound-design minimalism, and Bénéteau's execution suggests real awareness of that tradition.
The decision to let the radio's voice remain intimate and paternalistic rather than mechanical or booming—that tonal choice reframes the entire dystopia as something seductive rather than obviously monstrous, which does exponentially more work than any visual effects budget could.