De nit
2023 · 20m · España
Directed by Ona Jané Millà
Tones: contemplative, tender
Lea and her mother Júlia decide to spend a weekend in the countryside to disconnect from their hectic urban lives. Frustrated by a crisis with her current partner, Lea argues bitterly with her mother, breaking the purpose of the trip; but under the light of a lunar eclipse and with the help of an old family friend, mother and daughter manage to find each other again.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A lunar eclipse as narrative catalyst for mother-daughter reconciliation is the kind of magical-realist shorthand that usually makes me roll my eyes, but Jané Millà refuses to let it feel cheap—she's actually interested in the friction, not the fix, which almost makes me forgive the celestial intervention.
Jané Millà positions this within a lineage of Catalan intimacy cinema—the countryside as confessional, the eclipse as formal punctuation—with a restraint and attention to tonal modulation that elevates what could have been a greeting-card premise into something genuinely considered.
The decision to let the argument breathe and fester before any resolution arrives is what distinguishes this; most filmmakers would soften the mother-daughter conflict earlier, but Jané Millà holds the discomfort, making the eventual tenderness feel earned rather than orchestrated.