Their Eyes

The scouts

It's doing the obvious thing — Global South labor + AI exploitation — but the self-shot footage twist keeps it from landing as pure sloganeering; there's real friction between what the film is saying and how it lets those workers speak for themselves, which is more interesting than I expected.

Gourault's essayistic montage work here sits firmly in the lineage of Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl—the formal decision to let workers' own visual documentation sit alongside their labor creates a grammar of counterpoint that feels both rigorously constructed and ethically precise.

The decision to cut between the micro-workers' hands labeling images and their own iPhone footage of domestic space is devastatingly simple, but it's the rhythm of that intercut—the pause just before the self-shot material arrives—that transforms what could be didactic into something that actually lives in the body.

Reviews

In his analysis of the division of labour in the manufacturing workshop, Marx describes how the worker becomes a “fragment of his own body”. With the transformation of the workshop into the machinic factory, this process intensifies.

Festivals

• Berlinale Shorts 2025
• Glasgow Short Film Festival 2025
• Kaboom Animation Festival 2026, Best Documentary
• Leeds International Film Festival 2025, Best Documentary
• Sapporo International Short Film Festival 2025, Best Experimental Film
• Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Montreal 2025, Best Animation