The Guide
2016 · 2m · Russia
Directed by Diana Galimzyanova
Genres: experimental, thriller
After a stranger photobombs her selfie, a young woman becomes fixated on him and begins trailing him through the city.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A photobombed selfie as the inciting incident for a two-minute stalker thriller—it's absurd, it's oddly prescient about how social media parasitism works, and it somehow lands the tension where it absolutely shouldn't. This is the kind of premise that makes you laugh and then immediately feel unsettled, which is exactly where Felix lives.
Galimzyanova compresses voyeuristic pursuit into a formally controlled two minutes, leveraging the grammar of experimental cinema to ask uncomfortable questions about spectatorship and desire; the film sits knowingly in conversation with Hitchcock and the avant-garde's fascination with the observer's gaze.
The decision to keep the stranger's face fragmented, never quite revealed—caught only in reflections and peripheral frames—is what makes this work; it's a single formal choice that transforms casual photobombing into something genuinely unsettling within a micro-budget constraint.