Fish Head
2020 · 10m · Australia
Directed by Grace Tan
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
An alienated teen on the cusp of womanhood finds an alternate, mythic coming of age by the sea where lines of gender dissolve.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a coming-of-age film that actually dissolves gender instead of just gesturing at it—the mythic register lets Tan do something genuinely strange with the form, which is rare enough that it almost makes the subgenre feel alive again.
Tan situates herself squarely in a lineage of poetic coming-of-age cinema (there's Céline Sciamma's DNA here, maybe Lucile Hadžihalilović), but the decision to literalize liminality through the sea's mythic space shows a curator's understanding of how genre tradition can contain radical formal work.
The specific choice to let the ocean's rhythm dictate pacing rather than dialogue or plot mechanics is what elevates this—it's a 10-minute film that trusts its visual texture and ambient sound design to do the character work most indie coming-of-age films waste budget trying to explain.