Heartbeats
1992 · 20m · Canada
Directed by Dorothy Todd Henaut
Tones: humorous, sensual, tender
Close, intimate imagery follows a heavily pregnant woman and her partner, exploring desire, tenderness and humour late in pregnancy.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's too busy genuflecting at the altar of pregnancy-as-sacred-miracle to notice Henaut's actually doing something weirder—making desire and the body funny, messy, and alive in the third trimester, which apparently is still taboo enough to feel genuinely subversive.
Henaut positions intimacy within a lineage of body-conscious cinema that resists sentimentality, and the film's formal restraint—letting close photography and duration do the argumentative work—marks it as work aware of its own aesthetic inheritance.
The decision to stay intimate and close rather than pull back for context, to let humor emerge from the specificity of the body rather than narrative setup, transforms what could've been a PSA into something that actually *feels* like being present in a room with desire and vulnerability.