City Girl
2026 · 2m
Directed by Chiara Rivalta, Nikita Bolotov
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A young woman deprives herself of living — a burger she dares not finish, makeup too perfect, joyless intensive sport — prisoner of a beauty ideal that exhausts her, until the moment she decides to let go.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent PSA about diet culture dressed up as drama—the kind of thing that plays well at school assemblies but doesn't push back on anything; you could've inverted the whole premise and made something genuinely unsettling, but instead we get the expected catharsis.
The film positions itself squarely in the lineage of feminist coming-of-age shorts, and while the thematic clarity is admirable, the execution feels too neat—there's craft in the constraint of two minutes, but the editing lacks the formal risk that would elevate this beyond a well-intentioned statement.
That decision to let the burger sit half-eaten on frame while she walks away—holding the small refusal before the grand release—is the move that makes this work; it's where Rivalta and Bolotov stop explaining and let restraint do the storytelling.