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When the Movie Continues After the Cinema: Reel Selves Comes to NewCinema/Shorts+
French filmmaker Gabriel Chourrier turns a chance encounter outside a Paris cinema into a playful exploration of cinephilia in Reel Selves, an eight-minute short coming to Whush as part of the NewCinema/Shorts+ showcase.
Made in France in 2025, the film begins with a simple situation. It is raining in Paris. A young man in shorts meets a young woman looking for a lighter outside a cinema. They have just seen the same film, and they begin talking.
Their conversation soon turns towards the films they would like to make. He imagines violence, blood and gunfire. She dreams of beautiful light and celluloid. Gradually, those ideas begin to escape the conversation and enter the film itself, allowing the cinema they are imagining to become part of the cinema the audience is watching.
For Chourrier, Reel Selves is both a short narrative about two young people meeting and an expression of his own relationship with cinema.
A Real Encounter Becomes a Film
The origins of Reel Selves can be traced to Chourrier's meeting with Alice Tiedrez, who plays herself in the film.
After finishing a night shift, Chourrier went to the cinema alone in the middle of the afternoon. When he emerged, the weather was cold and rainy. Tiedrez was outside, and the two walked together towards the subway.
Their conversation left an impression on him.
Chourrier remembers Tiedrez as being optimistic about the future at a time when he himself had accumulated considerable frustration. That contrast became the starting point for the screenplay.
“Our conversation was a real eye-opener for me,” he explains. From that encounter came the idea of staging “the meeting of two characters who dream of cinema to the point that it becomes reality.”
The film retains the simplicity of that original situation while gradually moving away from everyday reality as the characters' cinematic imaginations begin shaping what appears on screen.
An Ode to Movie Theatres
Chourrier describes Reel Selves as an ode to movie theatres and to the different kinds of cinema that have influenced him.
While writing the screenplay, he was listening to French rapper SCH, which unexpectedly reconnected him with the films he loved when he first became interested in cinema. He cites violent, stylised films including The Godfather and Sin Cityamong those early influences, and incorporated that enthusiasm into the young man's character.
At the same time, the film draws on the more intellectual cinephilia Chourrier encountered after moving through the Paris film world.
Rather than choosing between those influences, Reel Selves deliberately brings them together.
“As a tribute, I let myself be carried away poetically by all these contradictory references to shout my love for cinema,” Chourrier says.
That mixture is reflected in the filmmaking itself. Reel Selves uses static shots, black-and-white photography and opening credits that give it an intentionally classical foundation. Against that, Chourrier introduces re-recorded sound, visual effects and other experimental elements as the characters' imagined cinema begins to intrude upon the film.
The director felt that maintaining a recognisable visual foundation was important precisely because it gave him greater freedom to experiment as the short progressed.
Made on a Shoestring
The production of Reel Selves followed the intimate and collaborative approach Chourrier has developed across his work.
The film was made on a shoestring budget and shot entirely on location or in public spaces in Paris and Charente-Maritime, with friends, local businesses and film schools helping the production along the way.
The first scene was filmed outside the Écoles Cinéma in Paris, which allowed the filmmakers to use its frontage during an intermission. Another location, the Brûlerie de Varennes, gave the team access to its terrace for a night shoot.
Voice recording took place at ESRA Paris, sound editing was completed in a home studio in Marseille, and the opening credits and remaining post-production work were completed at ENS Louis-Lumière.
Cinematographer Paul Arnould photographed, lit and colour-graded the film, as well as creating its visual effects and designing the setup used to shoot the opening credits. Chourrier wrote, directed and edited the short.
Working with Minimal Equipment
The film's visual character was achieved with an unusually small production setup.
According to Arnould, the outdoor scenes were shot using only two small LED panels. The limitations meant the filmmakers had to rely heavily on available light and carefully consider framing and composition.
One sequence filmed on a beach was particularly demanding. With only a brief window during sunset, the four-person team had limited opportunities to capture the scene while simultaneously managing changing light, camera movement and performances.
Arnould says he and Chourrier initially wanted a raw, high-contrast image inspired by the early work of John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese's Who's That Knocking at My Door. When they were unable to fully achieve that look during production, they reconstructed aspects of it later through colour grading.
The film's opening titles became an opportunity to take a more graphic approach. Inspired by Saul Bass's titles for Bunny Lake Is Missing, the sequence was developed late in post-production and, somewhat ironically, required considerably more equipment than the rest of the film.
Gabriel Chourrier and Collective Filmmaking
Chourrier has been developing an intimate and personal filmmaking practice based around small-scale, collaborative production, often working with close friends.
Before Reel Selves, he directed several short fiction and documentary projects and made his first self-produced feature, Dear John, in 2021. The film later became a semi-finalist at the 2023 Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival.
His earlier shorts include Pour le Film, co-directed with Damas Roy, and Le soleil en pleine nuit, which was selected for the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University Short Film Festival.
After spending three years working on an entrepreneurial project, Chourrier's encounter with Alice Tiedrez brought him back to filmmaking and led to Reel Selves a few months later.
Coming to NewCinema/Shorts+
Reel Selves has begun its festival journey with selections including AXD Film Festival 2026, Festival du jeune cinéma – Faciné 2026 and the 1st Anniversary Festival of Out of the Blue Paris.
The film will now reach audiences worldwide through NewCinema/Shorts+ on Whush.
At its centre is a familiar experience for anyone who has left a cinema still caught up in what they have just watched: the temporary feeling that the film might somehow continue outside the theatre.
Chourrier takes that feeling literally. A conversation between two young cinephiles becomes an opportunity to move between different cinematic influences, from classical black-and-white filmmaking to genre cinema and experimental effects.
The result is a short about meeting someone outside a movie theatre, but also about what happens when the films we watch begin shaping the films we imagine making ourselves.
Reel Selves (Projections Imaginaire, France, 2025), written, directed and edited by Gabriel Chourrier, runs 8 minutes in French and will stream worldwide on Whush as part of the NewCinema/Shorts+ showcase.
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