Pinky Promise
2016 · 11m · USA
Directed by Catharine E. Jones
Genres: comedy, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: humorous, tender, whimsical
At a tense office dinner party where two co-workers expect to learn the fate of their careers, an unexpected spark surfaces between them — quietly reshaping a friendship into something more, across lines of ethnicity and workplace hierarchy.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A queer workplace rom-com playing it straight (narratively, at least)—solid premise, but Jones doesn't quite find the subversive angle hiding in the fine-art-world hierarchies and career paranoia that could've made this genuinely weird.
Jones executes the real-time dinner-party constraint with formal precision, and the cross-cultural, cross-hierarchy romance lands with genuine tenderness; it's a film aware of its rom-com lineage while earning its emotional specificity through careful mise-en-scène.
The decision to let the romantic awakening breathe entirely through glances and silences across a tense dinner table—rather than spelling it out—transforms what could've been stock workplace dynamics into something that feels earned and alive.
Festivals
- International Different Faces Different Voices Film Festival 2016, Best Director