Lose Me Not
2025 · 14m · Switzerland
Directed by Desmond Hudson, Nina Zogg
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Joey, a nineteen-year-old grappling with deep depression since the loss of his mother, drifts through life without purpose. The film follows him to the edge of a steep cliff, where his interior world of grief and suicidal ideation is rendered with subjective, experimental imagery before a small turning point pulls him back.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Hudson and Zogg could've played it safe with grief-as-wallpaper, but instead they've made the inside of depression *visible*—subjective, experimental, refusing the sentimental shortcuts everyone expects from a film about a kid at a cliff. It's the rare teen mental health film that actually resists consensus.
The confessional monologue-as-subjective-cinema places this squarely in a lineage of formally ambitious introspection—think Chris Marker's essayism applied to the suicidal moment—and the craft discipline required to render interiority without voiceover narration or aesthetic indulgence is precisely what separates the considered from the merely urgent.
The decision to make the cliff not a climax but a *threshold*—treating the exterior space as a stage for interior monologue rather than a setting—is what lifts this; that single formal choice transforms what could've been another depression narrative into something that actually *shows* you how this person thinks.
Festivals
- Indie Short Fest 2023