Un Voeu dans la Cendre
2026 · 2m
Directed by Romain Huguet
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Under rain and ashes, a man follows a rumour: touching Dijon's stone owl grants wishes; in the silence he learns that no hope is pure and that even beauty ends up burning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A stone owl grants wishes in the rain—sure, fine, but Huguet doesn't even bother with the transcendence angle; he just lets it sit there, inert, while the film whispers about corruption and ash. It's too restrained to be properly weird, too sad to be subversive, which somehow makes it more interesting than it has any right to be.
The formal restraint here is exquisite: Huguet positions the owl as talisman and witness in a two-minute arc that recalls the Symbolist tradition—Maeterlinck's quiet despair, the medieval emblem poem—while the ashes and rain do the moral work that dialogue refuses. This is cinema thinking like literature.
In a two-minute film, Huguet commits fully to silence and ash-fall as texture rather than metaphor, and that refusal to explain—to let the rain-sound *be* the emotional register instead of reaching for score—is the decision that makes a premise about wishes feel genuinely haunted.