Long's Long Lost & Mini Mart
2025 · 18m
Directed by Julian Doan
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In the seedy back rooms of a Little Saigon convenience store, a young customer seeking closure reanimates his dead father for one last conversation, awakening phantoms of unspoken grief.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people would've made this a straightforward ghost story or family melodrama, but Doan threads it as dark comedy in a convenience store back room — which shouldn't work, and yet the absurdist collision of grief and mini-mart banality is exactly the kind of premise that makes you question why nobody else thought of it.
The film situates itself deliberately in the lineage of Vietnamese-American cinema and magical realism, with considered restraint in its supernatural apparatus; the 18 minutes never overexplain, trusting the formal discipline of the space and duration to carry the weight of unresolved loss.
The pivot happens in the sound design — the ambient hum of fluorescent lights and the convenience store's muzak become the emotional register for the haunting rather than a score, and that single choice transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely disorienting and alive.