Geneviève
1965 · 28m · Canada
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Two teenage girls attend Quebec City's winter carnival for the first time and share a tentative attraction to the same young boy. Their first love brings both sweetness and disillusionment.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A tasteful coming-of-age romance from the NFB vault — competent, tender, utterly expected. If you're looking for a film that challenges how we see first love rather than simply bathes in its glow, keep digging.
Geneviève sits squarely in the lineage of Quebec's cinematic awakening, a formally measured study in adolescent restraint that trusts observation over sentiment; the film's real sophistication lies in how it refuses to resolve the emotional triangle, leaving the viewer suspended in the same uncertain ache as its characters.
What catches here is the deliberate choice to keep the boys mostly offscreen—the attraction lives entirely in glances and the girls' imagined projection, which transforms a conventional love triangle into something about female desire and disappointment that a 1965 budget film had no business pulling off this cleanly.