Alumbramiento
2022 · 10m · España
Directed by Imanol Ortiz López
Genres: drama, horror, surrealism
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
As a child, she could see them jumping on the road, crushed under the wheels, lit by the car headlights on summer nights. Now, many years later, a strange feeling of vengeance fills her nightmares: Paula confesses to a psychologist her phobia of locusts while instinctively protecting the baby in her womb from a faceless threat.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A woman's childhood trauma with insects becomes a surreal, body-horror meditation on motherhood and protection—it's genuinely unsettling in ways that resist easy interpretation, and most scouts would probably call it 'too abstract,' which is exactly why it works.
Ortiz López situates this within the lineage of psychological surrealism (Polanski, early Eggers), and the formal control—the way dread accumulates through sound design and fragmented imagery rather than exposition—marks a filmmaker thinking carefully about cinematic grammar.
The decision to keep the threat faceless and the locusts as both literal and metaphorical creates an economy of gesture that transforms what could've been a student film into something haunting; every frame choice justifies itself.