Carta al churry
2020 · 14m · España , Uruguay
Directed by Antonio Ballesteros
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, tense
María waits on Zoom for her ex-partner Mario, who fails to show up for their meeting after months of friction. In an intense near-monologue, she reacts to his absence.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A Zoom breakup monologue sounds like exactly the kind of worthy-indie-film premise that makes me want to scream, but Ballesteros actually commits to the absurdity of digital intimacy collapsing—the no-show becomes a formal statement, not just a plot point.
The near-monologue form draws on a lineage of performance-based cinema (early Bresson, later Chiang), and there's disciplined restraint in letting silence and absence do the dramatic work rather than melodrama.
The decision to stage emotional devastation as a one-sided Zoom call—where the frame itself becomes a kind of witness to abandonment—transforms what could be maudlin into something structurally precise; that compositional choice is doing all the heavy lifting.