Plume
2026 · 2m
Directed by Stellina Salutare
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
She puts on her headphones as a shield, camouflaging the shouts from the living room as background noise, and clings to the sweetness of a childhood slipping away; a child's drawing of a happy family may just change the situation.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A kid-with-headphones story is about as consensus as coming-of-age gets, and Salutare doesn't exactly detonate the premise—the child's drawing as narrative pivot feels like the film believes its own earnestness a little too much.
There's a restraint here that recalls the best of contemporary European short cinema, particularly in how sound design (or its absence) carries the emotional architecture; the formal choice to let the drawing speak rather than narrate places this squarely in a lineage of craft-first intimacy.
In two minutes, Salutare trusts a single prop—that drawing—to do the emotional heavy lifting, and the decision to let a child's naive visual language interrupt adult conflict is the exact kind of economical, character-revealing choice that transforms modest budget into something that sticks.