first love

Films centered on the experience of romantic love that is formative and inaugural — defined by the intensity, vulnerability, and world-altering quality of loving before experience has built defenses. The register captures the specific phenomenology of first love: the way it reorganizes perception, the terror and exhilaration of emotional exposure, the sense that this feeling is unprecedented. Typically (though not exclusively) adolescent or young-adult in setting. Distinguished from 'wistful-longing' (which is about unfulfilled adult desire and roads-not-taken) by being specifically about the inaugural quality of the feeling rather than retrospective yearning; distinguished from 'coming-of-age' (which is broader in scope — identity, friendship, family, social formation) by being specifically romantic love as the primary subject rather than one thread among many.