Anonymous
2020 · 3m
Directed by Joan Paüls
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
A man and a woman dance while persistent little voices comment, in a reflection on women's position in relation to men in today's societies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise reads like every think-piece about gender dynamics, but at 3 minutes Paüls doesn't have time for subtlety—which almost works against the essay-film earnestness everyone expects, though not quite enough to save it from feeling like a statement rather than a provocation.
Paüls situates the work squarely in the essay-film tradition, where the body becomes a text and the voice-over apparatus interrogates its own position; the formal rigor of pairing choreography against commentary demonstrates real curatorial awareness of how experimental cinema can literalize abstraction.
The persistence of those overlapping voices—the specific choice to layer rather than alternate them—is what transforms what could be heavy-handed into something genuinely unsettling, a technical decision that does the argumentative work no monologue could.