Aurora
2015 · 15m · España
Directed by Ayoze Vega, Patricia Mejías
Genres: drama, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A solar storm knocks out telecommunications and the power grid, leaving a young woman cut off from her hyper-connected existence and confronting her true self beneath aurora borealis over Madrid, in a critique of technology dependence.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The tech-dependence critique is familiar enough that it nearly sinks the film, but Vega and Mejías refuse the expected catharsis—there's no redemptive moment, just a woman alone under lights that don't care about her connection status, which is genuinely unsettling in a way most eco-anxiety shorts aren't.
A precisely calibrated meditation on presence and estrangement that positions itself in conversation with both the sci-fi sublime (Tarkovsky's patient gaze) and contemporary experimental practice; the aurora itself becomes a formal device rather than metaphor, demanding we sit with its indifference the way the protagonist must.
The decision to strip away the city's noise and place Madrid under a phenomenon that doesn't belong there—the aurora is geographically impossible at that latitude—creates a subtle cognitive dissonance that does all the thematic work without a single expository line, and that atmospheric wrongness carries the whole film.