Flora
2015 · 7m · España
Directed by Carlos G. Velasco
Genres: drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Since the child left, nature has invaded everything: ivy and ferns cover walls, ceilings and floors, and Flora, a slave to inconsolable pain, wanders lifelessly through the rooms, already one more plant.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to read this as a grief allegory and call it profound, but Velasco's actually doing something weirder — making the surrealism *literal* rather than symbolic, which should feel pretentious and doesn't, mostly because he refuses to explain the metaphor back to you.
The formal restraint here is remarkable: a single location, minimal dialogue, and the camera's refusal to sentimentalize the overgrowth creates a visual argument about mourning that sits squarely in the lineage of poetic cinema from Tarkovsky through contemporary slow film, executed with genuine compositional precision.
The decision to let the botanical invasion happen *gradually* across shots rather than reveal it all at once is what makes this work — it's a patience that forces you into Flora's dissociation, and that pacing choice alone transforms what could've been a student film into something genuinely unsettling.