Le Jardin de Dolly
2023 · 3m
Directed by Lan Wang
Genres: experimental, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
Travelling through a magical garden of memories, Dolly embarks on a journey to explore her parents' past moments. It was an absolute pleasure working with Xu and Yutong :)!
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Memory-as-garden is about as expected as experimental family fare gets, and the director knows it—which is why the real move here would've been to break the whimsy, not float through it. Competent, sincere, exactly what consensus wants from a 3-minute fantasy about inheritance.
Wang situates this firmly in the lineage of memory-cinema and the garden-as-metaphor tradition, executing with formal restraint and a producer's care for emotional legibility; the craftsmanship is evident in every measured cut, even if the premise itself resists novelty.
The decision to filter everything through Dolly's point-of-view—never cutting away from her face as the landscape shifts—turns a familiar conceit into something tactile and intimate, and that singular formal commitment is what makes three minutes feel genuinely earned.