Amanecer
2016 · 13m · España
Directed by Daniel León Lacave
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Dawn in the city: a man and a woman wake up, chat for a while, he goes to work and she goes out for breakfast; all normal — or not.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise promises subversion — a domestic morning that's supposedly *not* normal — but the film seems content to let that ambiguity hang without earning it, which is either brilliantly restrained or just frustratingly coy depending on your tolerance for experimental hand-waving.
Lacave situates this firmly in the lineage of European contemplative cinema, with a formal patience and compositional quietness that recalls the Dardenne brothers, though the film's refusal to fully declare its stakes feels like restraint without quite becoming rigor.
The film lives or dies on a single choice — the decision to keep the "or not" completely opaque, letting performance texture and behavioral micro-shifts carry all the strangeness — and it's that commitment to ambiguity through acting rather than plot mechanics that just barely makes the thirteen minutes work.