Three Centimetres
2018 · 9m · Lebanon
Directed by Lara Zeidan
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, humorous, tender
Four young women ride a Ferris wheel in Beirut's oldest fun park, trading jokes and intimate confessions — until one's breakup advice triggers an unexpected revelation.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a Ferris wheel conversation film—the most obvious setup imaginable—but Zeidan somehow makes the reveal land without irony or manipulation, which means either she's found something genuinely new in the form or I'm getting soft.
A formally restrained piece that trusts the vertical geometry of the wheel and the rhythm of confession to do the work; the lineage runs back through Linklater and the before trilogy, but Zeidan's Beirut specificity and the intimacy between the four performers keeps it from feeling derivative.
The entire film hinges on how Zeidan uses the physical constraint of the rotating seats—the way bodies are trapped in profile, the way the cityscape wheels behind them—to make emotional exposure feel both inevitable and inescapable, and that single spatial choice transforms what could have been a talking-heads drama into something tactile and real.