A Forgotten Place
2024 · 15m
Directed by Alice Leigh Barrós
Genres: drama, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: melancholic, surreal, tense
A former stripper returns to her conservative rural hometown after a decade away when her mother falls ill, and something about her original departure — possibly supernatural, possibly a local assault — remains deliberately unresolved. A sci-fi-inflected drama where home and memory are both contaminated terrain.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A homecoming story where you never learn what she's actually returning from — the film weaponizes ambiguity better than most features manage.
Alice Leigh Barrós using sci-fi as the formal vehicle for a stripper's homecoming is a structurally serious move — closer to Janicza Bravo or Eliza Hittman than to genre filmmaking, in ambition at least.
The reason for the protagonist's decade-long absence is rendered deliberately ambiguous — hovering between supernatural event and real-world trauma. Andrea-Arnold-rural-realism with cosmic dread is a high-craft register and the refusal to resolve is the right move.