Look and don’t turn back
2026 · 2m
Directed by Ryan Counil
Genres: coming-of-age, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young man says goodbye to the places that marked his youth — unremarkable places, dear to him alone and ignored by everyone else — before a seemingly definitive departure, in a sensory, poetic experience of the places we carry with us.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing the 'return home' meditation these days, but Counil's refusal to make any of it *matter* to anyone but himself is actually the subversive move—he's weaponizing the mundane against the demand for universal resonance.
A measured essay film that inherits the tradition of personal documentary-poetry, situating itself carefully within the lineage of Valeska Grisbach and Andrew Haigh's quieter registers, though it risks settling into well-trodden formal territory.
In two minutes, Counil accomplishes what most coming-of-age films fail at—the decision to shoot the *spaces themselves* as the emotional core rather than the protagonist's face transforms a farewell into something genuinely sensory and specific.