Frozen: My Eggs & Me
2025 · 13m · New Zealand
Directed by Shamin Yazdani
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Single and approaching a mid-thirties birthday, Shamin, a first-generation New Zealander, confronts the question she has long avoided: should she freeze her eggs?
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the egg-freezing doc to be either a TED talk or a therapy session—Yazdani's refusal to land on either is genuinely refreshing, though the film sometimes mistakes ambivalence for insight.
A competent essay film that inherits the personal documentary lineage of Agnès Varda and Ross McElwee, though it hasn't yet found the formal invention that would elevate self-interrogation into something architecturally necessary.
The decision to layer Yazdani's voice—wry, searching, never settled—over intimate moments with her parents and doctors is what transforms a biological deadline into something achingly human; it's the restraint in that layering that makes the whole thing breathe.