Film Analysis and Review
HERE begins after the loss has already happened. There is no death scene, no funeral, no explanation of who Paul was or how he disappeared. Brice Garcia and Pedro Podestá drop us into the aftermath, into a countryside summer where three teenagers have come to be together because being apart has become unbearable. The film understands something true about grief at that age: it does not announce itself in tears. It arrives as restlessness, as long silences, as the strange weightlessness of days that no longer have a shape.
What lifts the film out of conventional mourning drama is its refusal to stay literal. As the three move through fields and water and the slow hours of the country, one of them begins to be taken by visions. Garcia and Podestá do not flag these moments with effects or score. They let the real and the imagined occupy the same register, so that the viewer, like the grieving boy, can no longer be certain where memory ends and hallucination begins. This is the experimental gesture at the film’s centre, and it earns its place. Grief does exactly this. It blurs the membrane between what is gone and what is still here.
Shot on 16mm with an ARRI SR3 and Zeiss Super 16 lenses, the film has the grain and softness of memory itself. The 1:66 frame, colour-graded by Alexis Muller, holds the summer light in a way digital rarely manages, giving the countryside a texture that feels both present and already lost, as though we are watching something remembered rather than something happening. Raphaël Bourdin’s cinematography never reaches for the picturesque. It watches the boys with patience, holding on faces and bodies until the held duration itself becomes the emotion.
The title is the whole argument. HERE is about presence and its opposite. The friend is not here. The boys are trying to remain here, in their bodies, in the world, in the company of each other, while one of them drifts somewhere else entirely. The film closes without resolving whether the visions are a haunting, a breakdown, or simply the mind’s refusal to accept absence. It does not need to resolve it. The question is the film.
Filmmaker Insight and Production Context
HERE is the second collaboration between Pedro Podestá and Brice Garcia, following their 2021 short Le Souffle du Vent. Podestá is an Italo-Brazilian director and photographer based in Paris, who came to narrative filmmaking after years as a fashion photographer in Milan. That photographic eye is everywhere in HERE, in the composition of every frame, in the confidence to let an image hold without cutting away.
The decision to shoot on 16mm was central to the film’s emotional logic. Film grain carries an automatic sense of pastness, of something captured rather than constructed, and for a story about memory and loss that material choice does work no digital format could replicate. The ARRI SR3 is a 16mm workhorse, and pairing it with vintage Zeiss Super 16 glass gives the film its particular softness, the sense that the edges of the world are not quite fixed. Produced by Figures TV and graded by Alexis Muller, the film premiered on NOWNESS in April 2023, the platform’s curation itself a signal of the visual register the directors were working in.
What is most notable about the production is its restraint. There is no exposition, no backstory delivered through dialogue, no attempt to make the grief legible through plot. The directors trusted that atmosphere, performance, and the grain of the film stock could carry meaning that words would only flatten. That trust is the film’s central creative wager, and it pays off.
For Filmmakers: Lessons from HERE
Begin after the event. HERE skips the death entirely and starts in the aftermath. The most powerful drama is often not the incident but the long shadow it casts.
Let the format carry meaning. The choice of 16mm is not nostalgia. The grain and softness of film stock do narrative work, giving a story about memory the texture of memory itself.
Hold the shot. Bourdin’s camera lingers until duration becomes emotion. Trusting an image to hold is one of the hardest and most valuable disciplines a filmmaker can develop.
Refuse to flag the unreal. When the visions arrive, the film does not announce them. Letting the real and the imagined share the same register pulls the viewer into the character’s disorientation rather than observing it from outside.
Trust atmosphere over exposition. The film tells you almost nothing in words and everything in image, light, and silence. Restraint is not absence. It is confidence.
Make the title the argument. HERE names exactly what the film is about, presence and absence, and the whole work earns the single word.
Verdict
HERE is eleven minutes of grief rendered as texture and light rather than incident. It trusts its images, its film grain, and its silences to carry an emotional weight that dialogue would only diminish, and it closes on a question it is wise enough not to answer. A quietly assured piece of experimental filmmaking from a directing duo with a genuine command of the frame.
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