Nostalgia
2020 · 4m · Argentina
Directed by Alexan Sarikamichian, Guido Barbosch
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Filmed over Zoom during seven months of quarantine in Buenos Aires, teenagers from around the world in the same condition meet on video to talk about their feelings.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A Zoom doc about teenagers processing feelings during lockdown sounds like the most consensus-friendly premise imaginable — and yet the choice to film over seven months, letting the formal constraint of the grid become the container for genuine emotional excavation, transforms it into something genuinely unsettling and strange.
The film inherits a lineage of formally restrained documentary portraiture, but the Zoom frame here becomes more than aesthetic choice; it's a period document that will eventually feel as historically specific as a film shot through a train window, and the directors understand the weight of that formal commitment.
The editing decision to hold on multiple faces at once in the grid, resisting the urge to cut and isolate, means the loneliness reads as collective rather than individual — a single structural choice that makes four minutes of teenagers talking feel nothing short of revelatory.