We Look The Same
2020 · 8m · France
Directed by Zo Fan
Tones: contemplative, humorous, tender
In a Paris vintage bookshop, a French-born Chinese shop assistant is caught between her boss's rules and a Chinese tourist desperately needing the toilet, in an awkward encounter that surfaces the microaggressions and identity questions she navigates daily.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the microaggression short to swing for catharsis or rage, so Fan's choice to let the encounter just *sit* in its own awkwardness—funny and sad and unresolved—is genuinely subversive; most films would've asked for more, and that's exactly why this one lands.
Fan threads the needle between Koreeda's deadpan humanism and the emerging diaspora-cinema lineage (Chloé Zhao, Justin Chon), using the bookshop's confined geometry and the trilingual texture as formal argument about code-switching and invisible labor.
The decision to play the toilet urgency completely straight—not exaggerated, not deflated—against the assistant's internal collapsing is the hinge; that tonal restraint, and a single moment where she catches herself performing for the boss, transforms a 8-minute sketch into something that *sees* her.
Reviews
A witty short about racial and culture crises, featuring a French-born Chinese store assistant faced with a conundrum.
The film addresses the human struggle of how one's identity is questioned and challenged in response to the subtle discriminatory words or actions of others.