Made in China
2020 · 7m
Directed by Ale Damiani
Genres: comedy, drama, romance
Tones: absurdist, tender, whimsical
After their first night together following a Tinder match, a boy and a girl discover they must quarantine together because of a strange pandemic.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The pandemic-as-meet-cute is almost too on-the-nose for comfort, and yet Damiani sells the absurdist pivot by refusing to wink at the audience — it commits to tenderness in the teeth of catastrophe, which is genuinely subversive in a rom-com context.
A formally precise chamber piece that situates itself squarely in the post-*Before* trilogy lineage of two-character intimate dialogues, with the quarantine constraint functioning as both literal and metaphorical pressure cooker for character revelation.
The whimsy lands because of one choice: Damiani treats the absurd premise (locked together, no explanation) with the same emotional weight as the vulnerability, never letting the setup overshadow the specific moments of connection that make the confinement matter.