The Ash-Eye

Fanny (Naomie Margot) and Lise (Mélanie Carrel) have been together for years, long enough that their life has settled into the comfortable rhythms of a shared home. One night a mysterious black object falls from the sky and lands on their lawn. Curious, each woman touches it, and each wakes to find her left eye strangely altered. The transformation is subtle at first, but it changes how they see and, more unsettlingly, how they see each other, and the relationship they took for granted begins to crack under the strain. Vincent Annen's seventeen-minute French-language short, produced in Switzerland, uses a science-fiction premise as a lens on intimacy itself: what happens to a couple when one partner starts to perceive the world differently from the other. Quiet, eerie and emotionally precise, The Ash-Eye is less about the object than about the distance it reveals.