The First Time I Never Met You
2024 · 14m · UK
Directed by Eric Kole
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A grieving physicist accidentally rewinds time to his very first date with his now-deceased wife, but must win her over again as the changed man he has become — not the man she originally fell in love with.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Time travel that proves you're irreversibly different from the person your dead wife married — the genre machinery is doing genuine philosophical work here, not just decoration.
Eric Kole turns the time-travel mechanism into a cruelty — the protagonist's grief has erased the version of himself his wife loved. A solid emotional logic that elevates the premise above About Time imitation.
The framing — grief has erased the man his dead wife loved, so the rewind only confirms the loss — is genuinely better than the usual time-travel-romance move. Hangs entirely on the lead performance, but the conceit is doing heavy lifting.
Festivals
- Sunderland Shorts 2024, Honourable Mention — Best Science Fiction