Fish Hook and Eye
2015 · 9m
Directed by Yildy Aktas
Genres: experimental, fantasy, romance
Tones: mythic, sensual, surreal
'Love' personified as a femme fatale guides the audience through the various stages of falling in love.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Love as a femme fatale *should* be a tired trope, but Aktas leans into the surreal mythmaking so hard that it becomes genuinely disorienting—less Cupid, more Baudelaire fever dream, and yeah, I'm into it.
Fish Hook and Eye situates itself deliberately in the lineage of symbolic cinema—Cocteau's poetic realism, maybe some Deren—and the formalist commitment to personification as visual language shows real curatorial restraint and precision across nine minutes.
The decision to let Love herself guide the narrative rather than simply appear in it creates an off-kilter intimacy; that structural choice—making her the witness rather than the prize—is what separates this from every other romance allegory.
Reviews
Fish Hook and Eye follows "Love" personified as a femme fatale as she guides the audience through the various stages of falling in love.