Heartstone

The scouts

Grief-and-object meditation is the safe lane of festival drama, and Zhu doesn't seem interested in upending that — which means either she's executing something so formally precise it transcends the premise, or she's made exactly what we expected.

A three-minute animated elegy that trusts the image to carry the weight of loss — Zhu's control of pacing and visual metaphor here situates *Heartstone* in a lineage of poetic shorts that know restraint is its own kind of eloquence.

The specific animation choice — whether it's the texture of the stone itself, or the way she renders memory versus present — will determine if this lives as sentiment or as something that actually *feels* like grief in the body.