Fátima
2023 · 17m · España
Directed by Juanda Arboleda
Genres: biography, documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Fátima is an outgoing, affectionate, cheerful young woman, deeply involved in the educational and sociocultural life of her area and first president of the National Council for Childhood and Adolescence of Catalonia. In August 2018, her mother Rosario receives a call that changes their lives forever.
Picked by Zoe
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Everyone expects a hagiography when you're making a film about an activist and community leader—Arboleda's refusal to mythologize Fátima, letting the August phone call hang as rupture rather than redemption, is genuinely strange and more honest for it.
The film sits consciously in the lineage of intimate documentary portraiture, where the personal archive and present-tense reflection become formal equivalents; Arboleda's restraint in not rushing toward resolution places it closer to Godard's late work than conventional biographical cinema.
The decision to structure the film around an absent event—that transformative phone call we never quite see—means everything lands on Arboleda's editing between Fátima's documented public warmth and Rosario's private aftermath, a single formal gamble that reframes what biographical cinema can hold.