Voyager
2017 · 10m · Francia
Directed by Loïc Magar, Roman Veiga
Genres: experimental, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Inside a two-square-metre model of a deserted city, a seven-year-old girl lives alone. The portrait centres on the place of technology in society and a futuristic vision of the familiar world.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A seven-year-old alone in a miniature city should be unbearable whimsy, but Magar and Veiga somehow make isolation in a diorama feel genuinely unnerving—they've weaponized the cuteness of the premise into something that resists easy interpretation, which is exactly the kind of move that makes consensus critics uncomfortable.
The formal restraint here is remarkable: a fixed camera, a child in negative space, and the patient accumulation of small technological details that feel both nostalgic and dystopian—this is miniature cinema in dialogue with the Expanded Cinema tradition, treating scale and perspective as philosophical material.
The decision to shoot the entire piece from a static, observational distance—never cutting closer, never dramatizing the girl's solitude—transforms what could've been sentimental into something austere and haunting; that refusal to manipulate the frame is what makes the quiet moments actually land.