Review Written by Roxy Turner

Matt Latreille’s quietly powerful drama on memory and enduring love takes Best Short Film at the Clown International Film Festival’s June–September 2026 season·

There is a particular kind of film that doesn’t ask for your attention so much as earn it, one frame at a time. Wherever You Want, which won Best Short Film at the Clown International Film Festival this season, is exactly that kind of film. Directed by Matt Latreille, it takes the familiar shape of a road movie and turns it into something far more intimate: a meditation on what memory holds onto, and what love leaves behind.

The premise is disarmingly simple. Joyce, an older woman carrying the weight of a long life, sets out on one last journey. Beside her is Sam, a young man who begins the trip as a professional obligation and ends it as something closer to family. What unfolds between them is less a story of events than a story of presence, of two people learning to share silence, space, and eventually, grief.

What makes the film sing is how carefully Latreille separates past from present, and then how gently he lets them bleed into each other. Cinematographer Eliana D’Assisi shoots the present day in soft, naturalistic tones, while Joyce’s memories arrive in stark, high-contrast black and white, often layered in ethereal double exposures that feel like recollections surfacing through water. It is some of the most thoughtful visual work the festival has seen this season, and it peaks in a golden-hour sequence in an open field that is nothing short of breathtaking. In that light, the film’s themes of hope and transcendence stop being ideas and become something you can almost touch.

Heather Vos anchors the film as Older Joyce with a performance built on restraint. She rarely tells us what she feels; she lets it pass across her face and disappear. One moment, roughly eleven minutes in, captures a flicker of memory so subtle and so complete that it says more than a page of dialogue could. Will Trineer’s Sam is the ideal counterweight: attentive, grounded, and quietly empathetic. The chemistry between the two never relies on grand declarations. It grows out of glances and shared stillness, which makes the emotional payoff land with surprising force.

The writing matches that restraint. Joyce’s voiceover threads through the film with elegance, supplying context and emotional depth without ever tipping into lecture. The dialogue stays natural and unforced, leaving room for everything left unsaid. And when Charlie’s closing voiceover arrives near the fifteen-minute mark, it plays like a eulogy and a love letter at once, drawing every thread of the film together with remarkable grace.

The film isn’t without room to grow. The flashbacks, however beautiful, tend to live in their own world, and a recurring visual motif linking past and present could have shown more vividly how memory shapes each mile of Joyce’s journey. A brief effect of a glowing saxophone around the twelve-minute mark also sits awkwardly against the film’s grounded aesthetic; the idea behind it is sound, but a quieter touch, perhaps simply staying with Joyce’s reaction, might have carried more weight.

These are small notes against a large achievement. Wherever You Want earns an overall jury rating of 8.0 out of 10, with its cinematography scoring a standout 9, along with a firm recommendation and the festival’s Best Short Film honour. Matt Latreille has made a film about where love goes when the people carrying it grow old, and his answer is both devastating and deeply hopeful. Long after the road ends, it stays with you.