Ma Chérie
2024 · 16m
Directed by Colleen Donovan
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An actress returns to her late grandmother's house to clear it out, frustrated by her career and haunted by her past choices. An unlikely new friendship helps her grieve and begin defining herself on her own terms.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent grief-and-self-discovery stuff, the kind of coming-of-age beat that festivals eat up—but there's nothing here that makes me lean forward and ask what the hell Donovan is actually doing with the form.
Donovan situates herself in a lineage of intimate domestic portraiture—the melancholic house-clearing as moral reckoning—with a formal restraint that allows space for the emotional architecture to breathe; the friendship that unlocks the narrative operates with genuine textural sophistication.
The precision is in the quiet—Donovan's choice to let the grandmother's absence speak through negative space and the specific cadence of the new friendship's arrival creates intimacy on a budget that never announces itself; that restraint *is* the film.