Miss Nothing
2019 · 14m · Australia
Directed by Richard Jamze
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Two young sisters travel alone to a Florida beauty pageant where their fraught relationship is pushed to its edge. An intimate, tender portrait of sisterhood rendered in a slow-cinema register.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects pageant films to be either exploitation or satire—Jamze just... watches the quiet devastation between two kids and refuses to comment, which is genuinely disarming in how little it cares about what you think it should be doing.
A precise exercise in restraint that positions itself against the maximalist tradition of spectacle cinema; the film's refusal to show the stage itself becomes a formal argument about where intimacy actually lives.
On $270, Jamze makes the choice to stay with the sisters' faces after the moment passes rather than chase the event, and that single decision—that discipline—transforms a premise that could've been thin into something that actually breathes.