Strawberry Ice Cream
2017 · 6m · Francia
Directed by Alix Arrault, Jules Rigolle, Martin Hurmane, Samuel Klughertz
Tones: melancholic, tense
Makoto is doing his best to raise his seven-year-old son Kazuki, but the violence that was once his life comes back to bite him, and he will have no choice but to face it before the eyes of the son he always tried to protect.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is competent trauma-meets-fatherhood stuff—solid but not subversive enough to crack the formula. Where's the formal risk, the weird tonal pivot, the thing that makes you actually uncomfortable rather than just sad?
Four directors steering a six-minute crime-drama pivot is a structural gamble, but the restraint in execution—the way violence is implied rather than shown—places it in a lineage of European minimalism that values what's withheld over spectacle.
Four voices on one story could be a disaster, but there's a single directorial choice humming underneath: the decision to frame this entirely through the son's viewpoint, making the father's past a shadow threat rather than the center, which completely resets what we're actually watching.