Despertar
2015 · 1m · España
Directed by Marta Medina del Valle
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Ametsa has been in a clinic for months, the same months she has been unable to sleep; affected by a strange variety of insomnia, she tries to endure her wakefulness, but doubts her situation will ever improve.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
One minute long and it still manages to make insomnia feel like an existential trap—most experimental work this short either lectures or collapses, but Medina del Valle just *refuses* to let Ametsa's condition resolve into metaphor, which is genuinely uncomfortable.
The film sits precisely in the lineage of durational and body-horror cinema—reminiscent of Stan Brakhage's formal investigations into consciousness—though at 60 seconds it risks feeling more like a precise formal exercise than a sustained argument.
The real coup is how Medina del Valle uses negative space and the rhythm of *not-cutting*—holding on Ametsa's face while the world moves around her—to make temporal distortion feel tactile rather than abstract, turning a constraint of the format into the entire emotional engine.