Ahh
2018 · 1m · España
Directed by Gabriela Sellanes
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Magui is a teenager who, like many, is not happy with her appearance, and the references of girls that are seen in magazines have nothing to do with her; she is fed up with all this.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A minute of body-image angst feels like the most consensus coming-of-age beat imaginable—Sellanes isn't subverting the mirror-and-magazine trope, she's just executing it competently, which is exactly the kind of well-meaning earnestness that puts me to sleep.
Sellanes situates herself in the lineage of feminist video art and mirror-confrontation cinema with formal clarity, though the piece relies perhaps too heavily on its premise to carry the emotional weight that its compositional restraint promises.
The decision to strip away voiceover or explicit narrative and let Magui's physical response—a single, decisive gesture of rejection—become the entire statement is what transforms a familiar premise into something that actually lands in the body rather than the head.