Direcciones
2023 · 14m · Costa Rica
Directed by María Luisa Santos, Carlo Nasisse
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
In Costa Rica — where street addresses don't exist and landmarks do the navigating — two filmmakers chart an intimate cartography of how people give directions.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's obsessed with the Costa Rican no-address thing as a cute cultural artifact, but Santos and Nasisse refuse to make it precious—they let the absurdity of describing 'the big tree near the church' as genuine infrastructure sit there, uncommented, which is exactly the move most filmmakers would soften.
This is essayistic documentary at its most rigorous: two filmmakers constructing a formal argument about place and language through accumulated testimony, where the editing rhythm of overlapping directions becomes the film's own cartography—it thinks formally about its form.
The singular choice here is trusting the human voice entirely: no maps, no cutaways, just people describing space, which means every pause and circumlocution carries weight—the film knows that the specificity of *how* someone points is more interesting than *where* they're pointing.