Grief
2026 · 2m
Directed by Eva Mariema
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
After losing his grandfather, Will goes walking; in a pedestrian street the reflections of his emotions appear, and through dance he confronts his anger, helplessness and sadness before finding peace and accepting the departure of the one he loved.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Grief as a dance-floor catharsis feels like exactly the kind of sincere, unironic emotional processing that should be insufferable—except Mariema commits to the surrealism so completely that the reflections-made-flesh conceit actually earns its sentimentality instead of just performing it.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of contemporary dance-cinema that traces back through Cunningham and Forsythe into the avant-garde, but what's notable is the restraint: Mariema lets the movement *be* the argument, resisting the urge to overscore or narrativize what the body already says.
The choice to make grief visible as literal reflections—and then to have Will dance *with* them rather than away from them—is the entire film; it's a single formal decision that transforms a two-minute runtime into something that feels complete, and the execution of that simple-but-difficult idea is what sells the whole thing.