Bloeistraat 11
2018 · 10m · Francia
Directed by Nienke Deutz
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Two inseparable childhood friends spend a summer holiday doing everything together, but as their bodies change with puberty, their fused friendship slowly begins to crack.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Coming-of-age intimacy fractured by puberty is exactly the kind of soft premise everyone assumes they've seen before—until a film actually has the nerve to sit with the awkwardness instead of resolving it, and suddenly the whole tired genre flips.
Deutz positions herself in the lineage of Céline Sciamma and other European coming-of-age formalists, using spatial and physical distance as her primary formal language—the film's restraint and its refusal of easy catharsis mark it as seriously considered work.
The film's entire weight rests on how bodies move in relation to each other across the frame, and Deutz makes the decision to let that spatial separation do the emotional work instead of cutting to faces—that single formal choice transforms a familiar subject into something achingly specific.