Souvenir Film Review

Star rating: 4/5

Writer: Renee Marie Petropoulos

Director: Renee Marie Petropoulos

Starring: Tanzyn Crawford and Emily Grant

Souvenir is a tense portrayal of young, same-sex female love.

Keira (Tanzyn Crawford) and Zoe (Emily Grant) are young, in love and on holiday together in an idyllic setting in a tropical resort, with plenty of time and space for intimacy and fun. Despite this, tension is sparked when Zoe, inadvertently it seems, breaks the boundaries of intimacy by taking pictures during sex, which Keira is visibly uncomfortable with, questioning it at first but agreeing to it in the end. From here on, Keira, whose family they are on holiday with, struggles to process and react to this.

Souvenir invites us to reflect on the premise of the boundaries of intimacy in romantic/sexual relationships and how the possibility of being recorded at any minute without wanting to, disrupts it when it is present during moments where it should be safe to be vulnerable and spontaneous, not pose dangers of feeling exposed. The tension continues throughout the film, which presents to us another situation where Keira is again exposed to the camera without her consent. Will Keira, at sixteen, find the healthy way to navigate this relational challenge?

Souvenir is a sensuous film that contains great cinematography of golden hour summer evenings, sweaty summer evenings, and wide shots of the landscape that makes the viewer long for summer and its universal suggestion of physical pleasure and emotional release.  The performances are great, with Emily portraying Zoe’s effortless dominance quite fearlessly, and Tanzyn playing Keira’s anxiety and doubts with subtlety.

The realities of intimacy, privacy and respect within relationships, particularly when young, shapes us deeply and for life. How do we deal with our boundaries being transgressed for the first time, and how do we react when this continues once we have expressed discomfort with this?

Zoe and Keira are both young and we could argue both equally vulnerable to power dynamics and lack of empathy within their relationship. The interesting question here is whether love and the best attempts at communication are enough for respect and healthy intimacy to be firmly established.  

SOUVENIR will screen at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival.