VIVANT
2026 · 2m
Directed by Lonni Maillard
Genres: drama, experimental, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
Outside time and space, a group advances in silence; their walk leads them to a deserted beach where a mysterious presence awaits, and in this between-world something cracks in them as the fragile, intense beauty of the world reveals itself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of people walking in void-space toward a beach feels like the kind of thing that should be unbearably pretentious, but Maillard commits so fully to the surrender—there's something almost punk rock about refusing to explain the 'mysterious presence' or spell out what cracks in them.
VIVANT situates itself in a lineage of contemporary transcendental cinema—the patient formalism of Tsai Ming-liang, the liminal spaces of Lucile Hadžihalilović—and Maillard's control of pacing and negative space shows a curator's understanding of how silence and duration become the grammar of revelation.
The decision to let the camera hold static as the figures move through that colorless between-world, never cutting to their faces, never breaking rhythm—that single formal constraint turns a 2-minute fragment into something that feels complete, like watching someone else's epiphany from a respectful distance.