Dir: Alisa Kolosova | Germany, Drama, 93′ 2026
Alisa Kolosova’s debut feature I Spy With My Little Eye, playing in the dramatic strand at Tribeca Festival, is a remarkably assured meditation on grief, friendship, and the obligations that survive death.
As sort of “love letter to female solidarity,” the German drama avoids sentimentality in favour of something more difficult and ultimately more affecting: an examination of how women carry one another through loss, resentment, memory, and responsibility.
What distinguishes I Spy With My Little Eye from many grief dramas is its refusal to romanticise female friendship by acknowledging jealousy, misunderstanding, and emotional distance: solidarity is not the absence of conflict but the willingness to remain connected despite it.
Yalda, Lou, and Solveigh have been friends since childhood but their lifelong bond is shattered when Solveigh commits suicide. Left behind are unanswered questions, unresolved tensions, and Solveigh’s five-year-old daughter. As Yalda and Lou sort through Solveigh’s flat and the remnants of a shared past, they have to decide which of them should become the child’s guardian? Their practical task of clearing the apartment becomes an emotional excavation of decades of friendship, forcing both women to reconsider what they knew—and failed to know—about their friend.
The child custody dilemma becomes a powerful metaphor. Yalda and Lou are not simply competing to prove who loved Solveigh more. They are wrestling with the practical consequences of friendship—what it means to show up when someone is no longer there to ask for help
Yalda approaches Solveigh’s death pragmatically with a need for answers, carrying guilt and a desire to make sense of what happened. Her relationship with Lou becomes increasingly complex as grief exposes old wounds and rivalries.
Although Lou is pragmatic on the surface, she nevertheless harbours her own doubts about whether she truly understood Solveigh. The custody question intensifies the emotional friction between the two women.
Although absent for most of the narrative, Solveigh is still very much a presence. Through memories, recollections, and the traces she leaves behind, she becomes a portrait of a woman whose struggles were partially hidden even from those closest to her. The child is more than just a plot device. She embodies the future that remains after tragedy and forces the surviving women to transform grief into action and care.
Kolosova presents female solidarity as a work in progress: cleaning an apartment, sorting belongings, caring for a child, remembering difficult truths. The film’s emotional heft lies in showing friendship as a structure of support that survives even when one pillar has fallen.
DoP Meret Madörin opts for an intimate, observational approach built around muted interiors, lived-in spaces, and careful attention to faces, allowing emotional shifts to register through performance and gesture.
For a debut feature, I Spy With My Little Eye sounds unusually mature in conception. The great thing about the story is the way it reframes loss through communal responsibility rather than individual suffering and this emphasis on friendship and caregiving promises a degree of warmth that offsets the darkness and feels comforting. Combined with a naturalistic visual style and an intimate scale, the film has the potential to be one of the more emotionally rewarding discoveries in Tribeca’s International Narrative Competition.
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2026