Forget Me Not
2018 · 15m
Directed by Florine Nuesch, Kim Nuesch
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Two small children wait on the pavement for a mother who never comes, their conversations revealing a pattern of being let down that they have never gotten used to.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a premise that could've been maudlin—two kids abandoned, woe is them—but Nuesch and Nuesch refuse the expected emotional crescendo, which is interesting; they're more interested in the numbness of repetition than the drama of betrayal.
A deliberate, carefully composed study in restraint that positions itself against the sentimentality of child-centered coming-of-age cinema; the formalism—the pavement as frame, dialogue as confession—signals a filmmaker aware of her own distance from her subjects.
The real choice here is letting the children's conversations meander and circle rather than build—no arc, just the specific rhythm of how kids actually normalize abandonment—and that refusal to engineer catharsis is what makes the small moments of tenderness actually land.
Reviews
The sibling interaction and affection is real, it's palpable. It's as if the girls have been through it all. Their mother who eventually turns up, right from the first shot lets you know that all is not well.