Bellybutton
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Hilary Eden
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
A Y2K teen gets her belly button pierced for her birthday and slides between fantasy and reality. The film tracks how mall culture, ads, and home life co-author a girl's idea of her own body.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Y2K shorts usually just cosplay the era; this one seems to actually be interrogating what those low-rise jeans and Cosmo covers did to a developing person. That's the version worth keeping.
Eden uses Y2K iconography as critique rather than nostalgia bait, which is the right and currently rare move; the Hittman/Korine pairing is ambitious but the mall-as-coauthor-of-the-female-body premise has real bones. The page suggests genuine formal thinking.
Y2K piercing-as-rite-of-passage with Girls Gone Wild-on-TV staging is sharper than most nostalgia bait — it's looking at the apparatus that builds a girl's self-image, not just dressing the set with butterfly clips. Mall-culture critique with teeth.
Reviews
An earnest observation of the cultural, commercial, and domestic surroundings of a young girl in the early 2000's