Fish
2016 · 4m · Irán
Directed by Saman Hosseinpuor
Tones: contemplative, tender
An elderly couple live in an apartment: the man is sleeping and the woman is doing household chores. The lady wants to change the water in the fish tank, but it slips from her hands and falls to the floor; they have run out of water for the fish, but with the man's help they find water for them.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
On paper this is aggressively gentle — elderly couple, fish tank, domestic routine — but Hosseinpuor's refusal to sentimentalize the accident, to milk it for drama, is genuinely weird in the best way; most filmmakers would've turned this into a metaphor, and he just... lets it be a problem two people solve together.
The film's restraint echoes a lineage of minimalist cinema concerned with duration and observation—there's a formal patience here that recalls Bresson's attention to mundane gesture, and the editing trusts the viewer's intelligence enough to sit with small, consequential moments.
What lifts this from a home-video sketch into something resonant is the decision to keep the camera still and let the couple's collaborative problem-solving unfold in real time—no score, no editorial intervention—so that the quiet coordination between them becomes the whole emotional weight of the piece.