Who We Were
2021 · 6m
Directed by Ryan Spahn
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A black-and-white short documenting two twenty-year-olds' romance running its course, and the unique disenchantment of outgrowing people.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent and sincere, which is precisely why it doesn't interest me—a documentary about young love dissolving is the safest premise in the book, and Spahn doesn't seem interested in breaking it.
The formal restraint here is exquisite: black-and-white cinematography that echoes the essay-documentary tradition while the editing pace mirrors the emotional tempo of two people learning to unlove each other—it's the kind of structural intelligence that rewards a second viewing.
The choice to let silences breathe between the subjects, rather than fill them with music or narration, does all the heavy lifting—suddenly you're watching the actual texture of disconnection instead of being told about it.
Reviews
Who We Were explores young relationships in all their heady euphoria and subsequent end, and comes at a time when the world is still contending with a pandemic whose best-case scenario was crippling loneliness and an unshakeable state of languishing. The film's cloistered and bare-bones quality, an inadvertent but fortunate by-product of its skeletal production, makes quite the impression in this context.