Reverie
2016 · 4m · United Kingdom
Directed by Stella Scott
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
A portrait of the dreams and aspirations of young Londoners, capturing the consciousness of youth in post-Brexit Britain.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Post-Brexit youth aspirations sounds like the most consensus documentary pitch imaginable—until you watch it and realize it's not interested in easy answers or neat argumentative structure, which is either brave or infuriating depending on your tolerance for ambiguity.
Stella Scott positions this essay firmly in the lineage of British social portraiture and introspective documentary, using the formal constraint of a 4-minute duration to distill a generation's consciousness into something that demands repeated viewing and careful consideration.
The real work here is in how Scott lets silence and negative space do the articulation—there's a single choice about what she *doesn't* show you that makes the difference between a well-meaning survey and something that actually breathes with the interior life of her subjects.