Prawn
2018 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Andrew Gillingham
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, family
Tones: contemplative, humorous, tender
A father decides it's time to tell his 14-year-old son 'the talk' — not about sex, but about the family's Jewish tradition of circumcision, prompting the boy to consult a rabbi, his grandfather, and the internet before deciding for himself.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a sex-talk comedy, and instead it's a genuinely weird meditation on bodily autonomy, religious inheritance, and what it means for a kid to actually *choose* his own tradition — which is exactly the kind of premise that shouldn't work but does because Gillingham refuses the easy laugh.
The film situates itself deliberately in the lineage of Jewish-American family comedies while subverting the genre's typical resolution; its restraint — the way it lets silences and side glances carry the weight of generational negotiation — marks it as formally conscious work that knows what it's arguing against.
The masterstroke is the decision to let the son's research montage (rabbi, grandfather, internet) unfold without judgment or voiceover — that structural choice, trusting the audience to hold multiple perspectives at once, is what transforms a premise that could've been sitcom fodder into something that actually respects the boy's interiority.