Through the Dunes
2021 · 13m · UK
Directed by Tim Price
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
On the cusp of adulthood, Lily is finally allowed to join her father and grandfather on the family's annual trek to bury their old Christmas tree in the Formby dunes — an outing that brings her long-simmering frustrations with her distant dad to the surface.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a coming-of-age story to climax with confrontation or revelation, so Price does something weirder—he lets the ritual itself become the emotional payload, the Christmas tree burial standing in for everything unsaid between father and daughter. It's the kind of move that makes you realize the premise was never really about the trees.
There's a quiet formal sophistication here in how Price positions the annual trek as both a specific Merseyside tradition and a universal structure for intergenerational reckoning; the film knows exactly what lineage it's working in—the British social realist tradition of finding metaphor in working-class ritual—and executes it with considered restraint.
The decision to keep the father largely reactive and weathered rather than redemptive is what makes this work; that single choice—refusing to soften him in the final act—transforms what could've been sentimentality into something genuinely earned, and it's a restraint that probably cost Price more creatively than any flourish could have.
Festivals
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2021