Genre Comedy

Je suis un vélo (2018)

Item: Je suis un vélo
Rating: 1.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★ — Je suis un vélo (2018)

Je suis un vélo (which translates, straightforwardly enough, as "I am a bicycle") is a three-minute short film from French Guiana, released in 2018 and produced under the banner of Collectif Lova Lova. French Guiana occupies an unusual position in world cinema: it is an overseas department of France, meaning films produced there can carry a French identity while being geographically rooted in South America, adjacent to Brazil and Suriname. That particular cultural in-between-ness, French administrative life grafted onto a Caribbean and Amazonian context, rarely gets much screen time, which makes even a pocket-sized production like this one a reasonably notable document of the place.

The film was co-directed by Quentin Chantrel and Léa Magnien, and there is something distinctly collective about the whole enterprise, with the cast including Morgan Chantrel, Soledad Morales, Roggy Charles, Lucie Magnien and Aurélien Chantrel. The family-and-friends feel to the names involved fits the Collectif Lova Lova model, which operates more as a community creative group than a conventional production house. The premise is as simple as cinema gets: a child pops to the shop for bread, forgets to secure her bicycle, and events take a gentle, wordless turn from there. No dialogue, a runtime measured in minutes rather than hours, and a story that could be sketched on a napkin. It sits in a long tradition of short-form comedy that trusts a single situation to carry the whole weight, something you can see in very different ways across other comedies like Little by Little and Cigarette. Whether the brevity is a feature or a limitation rather depends on your patience for minimalism.

It is also worth placing this alongside some of the other short and micro-budget work that came out of the 2010s on the festival and online circuit, a period when collectives and small regional groups found it increasingly feasible to produce and distribute films that might otherwise never have existed. For a blog like this one, built around the idea of tracking down cinema from every corner of the world, a three-minute Guianese short sits in interesting company alongside other discoveries from that decade, such as Lost Boy in Juba and Luigi. What all of these share is the sense that the film exists because a group of people wanted to make it, with whatever they had available, rather than because a studio greenlit a concept.

A-Z World Movie Tour French Guiana It's just over 2 minutes long. No speech. Seriously what am I really supposed to do with this? Child gets bike stolen by man. Man repaints bike. Gives it to another child. That child rides it off with the first child on the handlebars. Yeah... transcendent

And honestly, that last word says it all for me. There is something almost aggravating about how little this film asks of you and how much it somehow gets away with. Three minutes, no words, a bicycle changing hands twice, and yet there is a small, circular completeness to it that I did not expect. I am not entirely sure I could defend it as a piece of cinema in any conventional sense, but I also cannot pretend it left me cold. Sometimes the most pared-back thing in the room turns out to be the one that sticks. Go figure.

Rating: ★ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-06-19

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