SWIM

There’s something almost audacious about trying to capture love in a single minute. Most films spend hours building towards it—narratives that stretch themselves thin, characters burdened with backstory, dialogue engineered to convince us of what we’re supposed to feel. Eric Yeich’s Swim doesn’t bother with any of that. It trusts that love doesn’t need an explanation, only a moment.

The film unfolds on a lake, the water glimmering under sunlight as two people move together in its embrace. Nothing more is required. No context, minimal dialogue, no guiding hand to tell us who these lovers are, just a tender moment shared between two people in awe of each other. The quietness of the setting does the work—the light bouncing on the water, the rhythm of their movements, the way intimacy exists without ever being declared. It feels less like a narrative and more like an imprint, a fragment of life preserved before it drifts away.

What makes "Swim" resonate is the honesty at its core. Yeich has said the film comes from a lived experience, and you can feel that—it’s the difference between re-creating romance and remembering it.

That authenticity lingers in the smallness of the gesture: the touch of water against skin, the warmth of the sun, the fleetingness of a shared glance. The brevity of the piece actually heightens its power; it mirrors the way love often arrives in flashes, in memories too delicate to stretch but too precious to lose.

In just over one minute, "Swim" reminds us that cinema doesn’t always have to tell us a story—it can simply hold a feeling up to the light. And in doing so, it gives us something rare: love not as spectacle, but as presence.