Rain

Director: Christine Jeffs
(2001)

Christine Jeffs’s lush, languid film about a young teenage girl’s sexual awakening over the course of a traumatic summer in New Zealand watching her parent’s marriage deteriorate due to alcohol and infidelity is quite something to behold. Jeffs makes excellent subtle choices and depicts everything intelligently, letting events unfold lazily like a vacation day, perfectly adding to the ambience of the piece. Complicated and real— the cinematography is breathtakingly poetic and the performances are unhurried and true. A sleeper tragedy made even more gorgeous in its digital transfer to DVD.