Diez y nueve. Autorretrato con herida
2018 · 25m
Directed by Marta M Mata
Genres: drama, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Filmmaker Marta M. Mata portrays, with humor as a shield, the unfinished grief left when an older brother walked out of the family puzzle as a child.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Mata uses humor as a deflection device in what could've been maudlin grief memoir—that's refreshingly honest about emotional avoidance, though the essay-film form lets her off the hook from actually wrestling with the wound instead of performing around it.
A formally restless work that positions itself between confessional documentary and experimental essay, where the tonal oscillation between dark comedy and melancholia becomes both its structural principle and its conversation with the autofiction tradition.
The decision to weaponize humor as a literal shield rather than resolve it—letting the comedy sit uncomfortably alongside genuine loss—is the exact hinge that transforms what could be self-indulgent navel-gazing into something that actually *feels* like unfinished grief rather than neatly processed.