Dahlia
2026 · 2m
Directed by Alicia Abeloos, Laly Bosdeveix
Tones: contemplative, tender
Mélina, a passionate florist, welcomes a customer unlike any other: every year he walks through her door to order the same bouquet, and over time the ritual has woven a discreet but precious bond between them.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A two-minute romance about annual flower orders sounds like the kind of Hallmark premise everyone else would greenlight without thinking—except Abeloos and Bosdeveix have somehow made the repetition the whole point, which is either genius or exactly the kind of quiet subversion that bores me depending on the execution.
The annual-ritual structure channels a deliberate formal restraint that feels indebted to the European minimalist tradition—two minutes of accumulating emotional weight through ritual repetition, the kind of deceptively simple architecture that only works with absolute precision in the cutting.
What lifts this above sentiment is the decision to let the bouquet itself carry the emotional arc across years—the filmmakers trust that one recurring visual, one repeated gesture, will do all the storytelling work, and that economy of choice is what makes two minutes feel like a complete relationship.