Zehn Minutent vor Mitternacht poses a question: how do we encounter others? Like an invitation to rediscover Levinas's thought, the film traces a path toward a face, a revelation of infinity and the locus of all humanity. A striking feature: a soft, masculine voice addresses a man named Pascal off-camera. His delivery is hesitant. The words stumble and search for each other in rudimentary German. From the thickness of the mumbled words emerges the presence of bodies pulled from the darkness in fragments electrified by beams of blue light. They dance. The camera captures the diversity of bodies and faces that make up the RambaZamba Theater troupe. Some display the distinctive features of Down syndrome. One shot lingers on the face of a young boy whose tics and extreme mobility of features we perceive as signs of a disability. The film thus creates a sense of confusion: who owns the voiceover that delivers this fragile complaint? Is it that of the young boy? She tells us that Pascal, to whom she dedicates her words, has left the theater troupe and is a musician. From the blue vapors of a concert hall, the handsome face and massive body of the young boy emerge in a musical epiphany. To the ear, the heavy, deep sound of 21 DownBeat, his band. We understand that he is Pascal, to whom Mario Sanz is speaking. Thus is revealed the delicate tour de force of the film: the director has entangled Pascal's presence with his own voice, in the exposed precariousness of a stumbling diction. Through the moving apparitions, Mario Sanz reverses the stakes of the portrait, gracefully reversing its movement. The director, having to resign himself to never seeing his character again, turns his disappearance into a philosophical and perceptive experience. A remarkable and poetic lesson in the gaze, Zehn Minuten vor Mitternacht restores its subject to the full enigma of otherness and leaves us with the original encounter with "this Other as face," irreducible, which always eludes us.