double bill #10

Adolescence in stasis—youth caught between nihilism and yearning, their imagination becoming survival. In this double bill, teens drift through landscapes stalled between decline and desire.

In +6 Gain, Jorn Plucieniczak follows Symen and Sam through a post-industrial Belgian twilight where gaming becomes a portal. Their world is quiet yet charged with unspoken longing, as if the virtual realms they enter know their desires better than they do. In Akaboum, Manon Vila depicts roaming gangs of teenage boys wandering the outskirts of Paris. Their boldness masks their vulnerability; the group becomes both a shield and a trap.

Both films listen to the restlessness beneath monotony and look at the fragile performances of masculinity. In these drifting bodies and half-imagined futures, they reveal how youth invents itself when the world offers nowhere to go but in-between spaces.