All We Were
2023 · 20m · USA
Directed by Emily Aleece Burton
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Olivia, a struggling artist and hopeless romantic, is blindsided when her successful boyfriend Nico abruptly dumps her. The breakup is then refracted through both of their perspectives — for her, he was a broken man she could fix; for him, she was a beautiful mystery just out of reach.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a breakup film where both people are wrong about each other in exactly the same way—which should feel gimmicky, but instead it's almost too obvious, the kind of thesis statement that doesn't need a 20-minute film to land.
Burton's formal control here is meticulous: the dual-perspective structure recalls the lineage of films like *Rashomon* and *Annie Hall*, but she's refined it into something more tender and architecturally precise, where the editing rhythm itself becomes the argument about how we misread intimacy.
The real move is how Burton holds the camera still on both their faces during the simultaneous monologue—no cutaways, no montage—which forces you to feel the brutal clarity that they're speaking the same heartbreak in two different languages.