Two Apples
2022 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Bahram Javahery
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young woman who leaves her homeland hoping for a better life carries one keepsake with her: an apple pierced with fragrant cloves that holds the memory of home.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a diaspora story told through a spiced apple—competent, even moving, but utterly expected. The metaphor does the heavy lifting so the film doesn't have to; I wanted it to break its own premise, to betray the keepsake, to mess with the tender-memory contract it signed in minute one.
Javahery's restraint in the animation—letting negative space and the weight of a single object carry the emotional architecture—locates this squarely in a lineage of diasporic cinema that trusts objects over exposition. The cloves themselves become a formal choice, a recurring visual rhythm that deepens with each appearance.
The decision to animate the apple as the emotional constant while everything else shifts—the backgrounds, the figure's posture, the light—is what makes this work on a micro-budget; that one element anchors the whole film and keeps it from dissolving into abstraction.