Chica Latina
2019 · 24m · España
Directed by Javier Gómez Bello
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Alba, 'Chica Latina', is a woman who, despite her peculiar physique, works as a stripper; singled out by various sectors of society, she tries to find her place in today's world, one that needs to reformulate the place of women within a system full of contradictions.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The essay-film-meets-sex-work angle *should* be provocative, but Bello's approach feels more earnest than subversive—he's asking the right questions rather than demolishing them, which is fine, just not my heresy.
A formally composed meditation on the female body and social contradiction; Bello situates this work within the essay-film tradition while refusing easy moralizing, achieving the kind of slow-burn rigor that separates conviction from gesture.
The precision lives in the editing between stripper performance and confessional testimony—that tonal rupture, the way Bello cuts between flesh and philosophy, is the single choice that prevents this from becoming pamphlet.