Aurelie Mbeki

Forty one minutes is a lot of pilot and this one uses all of it. Two thirds of the way in I realised nobody had told me who the police were, and then I realised that was the point, and then somebody got arrested and I still was not sure. It is Marseille as a working port, not a postcard. The dockside sequence at night would play enormous in a real room.

Two sisters, one cliff, an afternoon that neither of them wants to end. There is a long stretch with no dialogue where the younger one keeps trying to swim out further than she should and the older one keeps not stopping her. I thought about my own sister for three days afterwards.

Shot on something with real grain, or graded to look like it, and either way the water reads as three different blues in twenty one minutes. The midday scene is blown out on purpose and it is the only time I have forgiven that. You feel the glare in your own eyes. The girl's face against the rock at minute fourteen is a still I would print and hang up.

The temptation with a short like this is to cut it to music and call it a mood piece. Instead it holds, and holds, and lets him finish his sentences. The one cut I would question is at four minutes, into the gulls. It is a breath the film did not need. Everything else is exactly right.

Eight minutes of a man walking a beach at low tide collecting things that people lost. He names them. That is the film. By the fifth object I was crying and I could not have told you why, and on the second watch I still could not. I have recommended it to eleven people. Nine have come back to say thank you.