Karavan Explores Journey Back to Self-Love with Touching Festive Short Film

With its emotionally charged storytelling and beautifully restrained performances, ‘Choose Love’ arrives as one of the season’s most affecting short films. Directed by Jakob Ström and created for the Greek fashion label Karavan, the film offers a cinematic exploration of what it means to return to oneself after years of silence.

A breathtaking and resonant work invites audiences into the quiet, powerful moment when a woman returns to the home she once fled, only to find the girl she used to be waiting for her.

Made for Karavan, a brand known for its playful design language and human-centered aesthetic, the film reflects the company’s belief that storytelling can illuminate the emotional threads that connect us. For Karavan, this project extends the brand’s creative world, expressing the warmth, vulnerability and authenticity that have long shaped its identity. Ström’s sensitive direction brings this vision to life with poetic clarity.

‘Choose Love’ follows a woman who arrives at her childhood house after years of distance. What begins as a simple visit becomes a tender excavation of memory. As she moves through the familiar rooms, she finds small artifacts hidden long ago, handwritten notes tucked behind picture frames, inside books and beneath mirrors. Each message was left by her younger self during moments of fear, shame and hope.

These notes become emotional breadcrumbs, guiding the protagonist through vivid flashes of the past. Holiday nights fractured by arguments, the quiet refuge of books and imagination and the raw vulnerability of seeing herself clearly for the first time. Under Ström’s nuanced direction, the film weaves these past moments into her present experience, creating a layered cinematic world where decades seem to coexist within a single breath.

Through its visual poetry and deeply human performances, ‘Choose Love’ captures a universal truth: We do not outgrow the need for love, and we must learn to return to it, especially within ourselves.

Karavan’s decision to go for a Christmas-season short film is rooted in the brand’s commitment to emotional connection. Rather than focusing on the product, ‘Choose Love’ reinforces Karavan’s ethos of embracing softness, nostalgia and the small hopeful gestures that shape who we become. By engaging viewers through narrative instead of traditional advertising, the brand expands its creative universe and reaches audiences in a more meaningful, lasting way, a vision elevated by Jakob Ström’s storytelling sensibility. Jakob Ström is represented by Directors Guild Helsinki.