Contrafábula de una niña disecada
2012 · 25m · México
Directed by Alejandro Iglesias Mendizabal
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
On her fifteenth birthday, bourgeois Gizella must give a speech at the elegant dinner her strict parents have organized, but a plant has begun growing inside her mouth and she hides her secret so as not to shame them.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A plant growing in your mouth as a metaphor for adolescent shame and bodily betrayal — so obvious it circles back to genius, and the fact that Mendizabal plays it completely straight, no winking, makes it genuinely unsettling in a way saccharine coming-of-age dreck never touches.
The film's restraint is its formal intelligence: the dinner-party setting invokes a clear lineage of bourgeois-interior transgression cinema, and the sustained tension between decorum and biological rupture reads as a carefully composed essay on the body politic of the adolescent girl.
The decision to keep the plant's growth *audible* — those wet, organic sounds layered beneath the polite dinner chatter — transforms what could've been a visual gimmick into something genuinely visceral and impossible to shake.