Souvenir had its North American première at SXSW, 13 March 2026
“Will you miss me when I’m gone?”, a female voice is heard asking at the beginning of Renée Marie Petropoulos’ Souvenir, co-written with Yingna Lu. Her words are accompanied by a series of tactile close-ups – a hermit crab scuttling on a bared belly, two sets of legs tightly entwined on a hammock. These are teenaged friends Keira (Tanzyn Crawford) and Zoe (Emily Grant), nearing the end of their time together on a tropical vacation with Keira’s parents Dmitri (Julian Garner), Milena (Athésia) and Keira’s little sister Dora (Erika Nbide). Yet these images are being shot not just extradiegetically by DP Adric Watson, but also intradiegetically by Zoe on her digital camera. For while Zoe may be gathering souvenirs of their time together, she is also transforming private instants into something potentially more public, as she takes images – and ownership – of the moment, stored for later usage.
In fact, Keira and Zoe are more than just friends. During an intimate moment in their bedroom, Zoe again starts taking photographs of Keira in a compromising position – and while Keira, after first objecting, gives grudging consent to her lover, something in the relationship shifts. For now intimacy has given way to intrusion, maybe even to abuse, as mixed-race Keira, an adolescent uncomfortable in her own skin and not fully out, starts questioning Zoe’s motives and her own trust. Unquestionably, Zoe’s candid shots give her a certain power over Keira. Yet perhaps she is just rebalancing a situation in which the bilingual family accommodating her occasionally exploits her inability to speak or understand French, and conducts secret conversations about her in her presence. After all, both these girls are tentatively exploring who they are, and feeling their way around what they like and dislike as they try to fit in.
When Keira takes a private selfie alone at the bathroom mirror, we can see her anxiously poring over every imagined blemish and flaw in changing her body. For she is the very picture of gawky teen diffidence. Petropoulos’ closely observed short film not only offers snapshots of Keira’s adolescent awkwardness exposed to the elements, but it also reveals that strange no-man’s land between confidence and self-consciousness that we are all forced to occupy in the age of the selfie and the digital upload. For any photographic memorial of young love can so easily be weaponised against its subject, even if it remains unclear which is the greater betrayal: taking those images, or suspecting their misuse. And so Souvenir casts the viewer as voyeur, and leaves us in a liminal space, between sand and sea, where childhood innocence, washed away by unease and ambiguity, is now forever gone and missed, with unsettling experience its only souvenir.
strap: Renée Marie Petropoulos’ queer short shows tentative adolescent love and awkward littoral rites of passage in the age of the selfie
© Anton Bitel
