Two boys spend a summer afternoon playing increasingly reckless games in an abandoned open-pit mine in rural Quebec. Their one-upmanship — jumping from heights, daring each other deeper into the quarry — starts as innocent fun but escalates into something far more dangerous when they venture into the mine’s flooded tailings.
Editorial Perspective
Jeremy Comte’s Fauve is a master class in tonal control. For its first half, it plays like a nostalgic childhood adventure film — golden light, carefree laughter, the joy of unsupervised freedom. Then the ground shifts, literally, and the film becomes something else entirely. Comte’s refusal to telegraph the turn is what makes it so devastating; the horror emerges organically from the landscape itself, as if the earth were simply reclaiming what was always hers. The final shot is one of the most haunting images in recent short cinema.
Where to Watch
Available on the National Film Board of Canada website and Vimeo.
Historical data reconstructed from archive.org snapshots of the Manhattan Short Film Festival website.
