With Love, Charlie
2024 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Jaren Hayman
Genres: drama, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
During the Korean War, a South Korean interpreter forced to work for the North interrogates a cornered American soldier, a meeting that haunts both men and their families for years.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This plays it dangerously straight—two men, one room, moral weight, generational trauma—but Hayman refuses the easy catharsis, leaving both sides suspended in amber rather than resolved, which is either cowardly restraint or quietly radical depending on your tolerance for ambiguity without payoff.
A formally precise chamber piece that inherits from postwar introspection cinema (the Bresson lineage of spiritual interrogation) while speaking directly to contemporary questions about complicity and inherited guilt; the 16 minutes feel carved rather than condensed.
The film's entire architecture hinges on Hayman's decision to cross-cut between the interrogation and the men's later domestic lives in parallel, making the same silences speak differently across decades—it's the kind of structural choice that costs nothing but observation and rewires how you feel about every preceding frame.