Bumblebee
2018 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Adam Beck
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young woman grieving her partner drifts between past and present, finding solace in memory.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Grief-as-memory drift is exactly the kind of well-trodden emotional terrain that makes most shorts feel like therapy workshopping—which means Beck either found a formal angle to genuinely defamiliarize it, or this lands exactly where you'd expect it to.
Beck situates this in the lineage of structural memory cinema—Chantal Akerman's durational patience, maybe early Solaris—where the editing rhythm *is* the emotional argument, not an ornament to it.
The power likely lives in whatever Beck decided to *not* show us, or in a single editing choice that controls how much we're allowed to stay in past versus present before the cut wrenches us forward again.
Reviews
A beautiful short directed by Toronto/NYC-based filmmaker Adam Beck. Jumping between past and present, "Bumblebee" follows a young women quietly struggling with the loss of her partner.