Temps Morts
2026 · 2m
Directed by Rose Dreyfuss
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, melancholic
In a small grocery store, a young vendor is stuck in his daily routine as hours and customers file past, all enclosed in an infinite cycle of boredom — until a sudden noise at the back of the shop pops his bubble.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two minutes of a guy slowly dying in a grocery store—sounds like every other ennui-soaked short, except Dreyfuss seems genuinely uninterested in *redeeming* the boredom, which is either a cop-out or genius, and I genuinely can't tell which.
A formally austere piece that owes debt to the Kiarostami school of duration-as-form, though the abrupt rupture at the end reads as an unearned gesture toward meaning—the craft is precise, but the argument feels incomplete.
The entire short lives or dies on how Dreyfuss holds the camera still through those dead minutes, and whatever decision she makes in that final noise—the sound design choice, the cut timing, the performer's reaction—that's the whole film, and it's the kind of economy that either locks you in or loses you completely.