June
2021 · 16m · UK
Directed by Joshua Thornton-Allan
Tones: contemplative, tender
During a camping trip, an unusual set of circumstances forces a father and his teenage daughter to confront the rift that has grown between them.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A father-daughter reconciliation in the woods sounds like Hallmark Channel purgatory, but Thornton-Allan's refusal to explain the strange event—just lets it sit there, working on them—is genuinely subversive; most films would be desperate to rationalize it, and he knows better.
The film locates itself in a sparse lineage of intimate two-handers that trust silence and landscape to do emotional work—there's a kinship with the restraint of certain Lynne Ramsay pieces—and the editing choices around what we see versus what we're forced to feel reveal a filmmaker conscious of his formal inheritance.
The decision to keep the strange event genuinely unexplained, never explaining or resolving it, forces every ounce of the film's emotional weight onto the performances and the sound design of the forest itself; that structural choice is what transforms a modest premise into something that actually lands.
Festivals
- British Short Film Awards 2021, Finalist
- Liverpool Film Festival 2022