Graines
2026 · 2m
Directed by Anakin Schlemer
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In an abandoned, ugly future, Flore and Basil, a couple left alone in a deserted world, barely survive until the appearance of a yellow tulip upsets their fragile daily life and confronts them with a choice: keep surviving, or start living.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Post-apocalyptic couple drama is the most tired premise in indie sci-fi, but Schlemer's two-minute gambit—hinging the entire moral weight on a *flower*—is genuinely perverse; most filmmakers would've reached for something weightier and ruined it.
The film understands its debt to Tarkovsky's meditative image-making and the romance-in-ruins lineage, executing that restraint with formal precision, though the yellow tulip borders on symbol-as-shorthand rather than earned metaphor.
In two minutes with almost no dialogue, Schlemer makes the yellow tulip feel like a rupture because of one choice—the shift from grey-blue grading to that single saturated color—and suddenly you understand that constraint *is* the point, that the couple's paralysis isn't about resources but about what they've decided to feel.