‘Fruit Gathering’ review: Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe winner is delicate LGBTQ Myanmar drama

Dir/scr: Aung Phyoe. Myanmar/Czech Republic/France 2026. 97mins

A fine-tuned combination of emotional insight, cultural detail and hard social realism gives quiet vibrancy to Fruit Gathering, the debut drama by Burmese writer-director Aung Phyoe. Set in Myanmar’s capital Yangon, the film centres on San Kyi (Nandar Myat Aung, from Phyoe’s 2022 short Evening Clouds), a shy young woman who has moved to the city with her mother and grandmother. While San Kyi and her grandmother are still deeply attached to their village roots, her hard-nosed, hyper-critical mother (an imposingly brittle Thida Soe Khant) has embraced urban values to the hilt.

The subtle vitality of Nandar Myat Aung’s performance is the film’s central motor

Following Phyoe’s well-received shorts, which also include 2019’s Cobalt Blue, this Myanmar/Czech/French co-production should make a mark on the festival circuit and among discerning cinephile outlets – especially with a LGBTQ+ focus – after winning Karlovy Vary’s Grand Prix Crystal Globe. With a superb, tantalisingly reserved lead performance by Aung, the film is a delicately-flavoured fruit, but a savorous one.

San Kyi works in a garment factory where she keeps her head down; when she gets in trouble for a minor infraction, new co-worker Theint (Nandar Myint Lwin) comes to her aid, winning her gratitude and affection. San Kyi helps the young woman in return, and the two become close – but, while San Kyi is clearly beginning to feel more than sisterly affection for her, it becomes apparent that Theint, focused on the bottom line of city survival, is not entirely to be trusted.

Following San Kyi through different shades of emotional turmoil, and the two women through stages of connection and distance, the drama is constructed as a chain of largely low-key incidents. Elliptical editing, cutting briskly between episodes, covers several seasons in the lives of San Kyi and Theint – the former more stable and consistently urban, while Theint moves through varying phases including a spell on a rubber plantation.

Fundamentally realist, the film, shot in Academy ratio, includes sequences in muted colours that elusively if not always convincingly evoke San Kyi’s memories and dreams. These segments focus particularly on her nostalgia for rural life, with Burma’s traditional spirit dances allowing San Kyi a delirious moment of release. DoP Thaiddhi, also a producer here, often holds on specific details, sometimes atmospheric (the light of a passing train on a bedroom wall), sometimes manifestly symbolic (a snail leitmotif with clear erotic resonance).

In some ways, Fruit Gathering is highly universal, notably in its depiction of rural-to-urban migration and economic precarity; the film makes it clear why Theint behaves as she does, depicting her as subject to social forces, conflicted rather than straightforwardly self-serving. The film also outlines factors specific to Myanmar,’notably the trend for young people to seek work in nearby countries like Malaysia and Singapore, risking being stopped from leaving the country (awkward exposition comes in a radio item outlining the effects of Myanmar’s mandatory conscription for men and women).

The cultural specifics also relate to the central relationship. While same-sex relationships are criminalised in Myanmar, certain expressions of closeness are seemingly part of the social fabric: San Kyi and Theint are seen walking hand in hand long before they kiss (they also share a bed, albeit fully clothed). Tellingly, while Nandar Myint Lwin’s harder-edged, more mature features maintain Theint’s ambivalence, the nature of San Kyi’s feelings is always apparent, despite her often wordless reserve, with varying intensities playing over Aung’s delicate, youthful features. Part of the complexity of this character study may lie in the way that she is filmed and edited, but the subtle vitality of Aung’s performance is the film’s central motor.

A late melodramatic turn works awkwardly, while a monk’s lecture on the dangers of sensuality can be read either as a sop to dominant national ideology or as a critique of it. But Fruit Gathering stands out as a nonjudgmental, quietly riveting drama, and one that is highly revealing about a nation that, because of its political history, has tended to keep its secrets.