The Ray
2024 · 6m · Francia
Directed by Briag Gueho, Lisa Lecoq, Nina Stanislas, Marie Yver De La Bruchollerie, Mathieu D'Antoni, Quentin Dorne, Antonin Flachat-Berne, Hippolyte Foucher
Genres: adventure, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Jake, an alpinist, begins descending from the summit of the world's highest mountain before getting trapped by an avalanche. Left without any equipment and totally exhausted, he gives up and lets himself die at sunset — until nature gifts him the magical show of the green ray as a second chance.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Eight directors collaborating on a six-minute alpine death-poem sounds like disaster, but they've weaponized the committee into something genuinely weird—that pivot from surrender to supernatural salvation refuses to pick a lane, and it's all the better for it.
The green ray itself is a literary gesture reaching back through centuries of Romantic tradition, and this film treats its apparition with the formal restraint and visual precision that makes the mythic feel earned rather than imposed.
Watch how the sound design isolates Jake's breathing in the silence after the avalanche—that single choice of what *not* to undercut it with is what transforms exhaustion into something transcendent, and suddenly the magical realism lands because we've been locked in his body the whole time.