Aimee Victoria
2021 · 11m · USA
Directed by Chrystee Pharris
Genres: drama, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Two deaf queer women of color, separated on their first anniversary by the COVID lockdown, stay connected through memory and longing.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing intimacy-in-isolation now, but Pharris cuts against the expected vulnerability porn—there's a refusal here to make their separation pathetic, which is the contrarian move nobody else is making.
The film situates itself carefully within the lineage of queer cinema's formal experiments with absence and presence, employing restraint as both aesthetic choice and political statement about whose longing gets centered in the archive.
The decision to let ASL and silence carry equal narrative weight—not as translation aid but as the texture of their world—is the specific craft choice that makes an 11-minute separation story feel necessary rather than sentimental.