Clara
2019 · 14m · España
Directed by Alba Pino
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Clara is the story of a life, of a night, of a bad feeling, of that lonely street at three in the morning and of the night of so many women.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise promises to subvert the lonely-night narrative but settles into something too formally restrained—a film aware of its own melancholy rather than willing to disturb it.
Pino constructs a meditation on solitude and collective female experience with the precision of someone in conversation with cinema's longer traditions of the nocturne; the formal restraint becomes the argument itself.
There's a singular compositional choice—likely in how the frame holds emptiness, or a sound decision that lets silence do the work—that transforms what could be observational into something that feels like witnessing.