Ausencias
2020 · 9m
Directed by Laura Río
Genres: drama, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Two women spend months seeing each other through a window as their glances grow complicit, until the March 2020 lockdown interrupts their budding story.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A window romance that reaches for something tender and ends up exactly where you'd expect—it's the kind of tasteful LGBTQ+ micro-drama that feels designed to make festival programmers nod approvingly, and I'm genuinely bored by its refusal to complicate its own premise.
Río constructs a formally precise meditation on desire and distance, where the window frame becomes both barrier and confession—the editing rhythm between stolen glances carries the weight of an entire relationship, situating this within a lineage of constraint-as-cinema that reaches back through Koreeda and Rohmer.
The singular choice here is negative space: what matters isn't the dialogue or even the faces, but the precise duration of each pause between windows, how the lockdown arrives not as plot twist but as the film's understanding of its own subject—that some connections exist only in their interruption.