Director: Jean-Marc Barr, Pascal Arnold
A hotel manager's small acts of defiance during lockdown form the spine of this French-Swiss comedy-drama from co-directors Jean-Marc Barr and Pascal Arnold.
What is The Rebellious about?
It is spring 2020, and Paris sits under strict pandemic lockdown. Félix, who manages a quiet hotel, starts quietly bending the rules, letting guests slip into empty rooms for stolen afternoons of intimacy the outside world has otherwise shut down. What begins as a handful of favors grows into something closer to a private refuge, and Félix finds himself caught between the risk of getting caught and the pull of offering people a moment of normal human connection when almost everything else has closed its doors.
Cast & crew
Lizzie Brocheré leads the ensemble in a role built around quiet improvisation rather than broad comic set pieces. She's joined by Christelle Chavanon, Jessica Cressy, Mamadou Malick Diallo, Seyna Kane, Victoria Lacoste, Emanuela Luongo, and Adèle Montebourg, who populate the hotel's revolving cast of guests and staff across the film's brief 77-minute runtime.
Context & significance
Released in 2024, the film is a French-Swiss co-production that uses the early COVID lockdown as a backdrop rather than a subject in itself, focusing instead on the small, private rebellions people improvised when public life ground to a halt. Barr and Arnold, longtime collaborators known for intimate, low-budget dramas, keep the scale deliberately small, centering the story on a single building and a handful of overlapping relationships rather than a citywide portrait of the pandemic. At just 77 minutes, the pacing stays tight, letting the film move through its ensemble of guests and staff without lingering on any single subplot for too long, which gives the piece the rhythm of a chamber play more than a conventional feature.
Where & how to watch
The film is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, through a Farsi-friendly viewing experience built for the Iranian diaspora. No Persian dub or subtitle track currently accompanies this title, so it screens in its original French audio.