Always Pretty
2026 · 2m
Directed by Bleitrach Lily
Tones: contemplative, tender
Lisa struggles to look at herself in the mirror and spends a long time in the bathroom getting ready before going out — she has a date. But when does her boyfriend truly find her beautiful?
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute film about mirror anxiety and romantic validation is exactly the kind of tender, introspective premise that usually puts me to sleep—but Bleitrach's refusal to resolve the question (when *does* he find her beautiful?) is a gutsy, almost hostile choice that rescues it from greeting-card sentimentality.
The economy of form here is precise: a bathroom intimacy film that locates itself in a lineage of mirror-scene cinema while maintaining its own restraint and contemplative register, the kind of formally aware short that trusts editing and negative space over explanation.
What lifts this beyond a familiar premise is the choice to keep the boyfriend almost entirely off-screen—the whole film becomes about Lisa's interior landscape rather than his gaze, which reframes the entire emotional architecture in two minutes.