The Night That Holds You

A summer has passed, but Valerie is still living inside the last one. Her lover Suzanne disappeared without a word, and the memories of their time together keep returning, vivid enough to crowd out the present. New Zealand writer-director Steven Chow builds this twelve-minute romantic drama around that ache, gliding between what was and what is as a young woman tries to hold on to someone who now exists only in recollection. Claire Van Beek and Julia Hyde star. Dreamlike and intimate, the film is less interested in solving a disappearance than in capturing the texture of longing itself: the places, sensations and half-remembered conversations that keep a lost love alive long after it has gone. The Night That Holds You is a quiet mood piece about obsession, grief and how hard it can be for the past to let go.