Fritas
2015 · 15m · España
Directed by Manuel Gomar
Genres: drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, dark
In late-1970s Spain, many homes lived terrible situations that were habitually hidden from others, as were the ways of resolving them.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a period piece about repression, which sounds like every other solemn Spanish film, but Gomar's refusal to sensationalize the violence—his commitment to the hidden and the unsaid—actually does something most provocateurs miss: he trusts the audience to feel the weight without showing the wound.
Fritas situates itself squarely in the lineage of Spanish cinema's reckoning with the Franco era, but what marks it as formally considered is how it lets silence and domestic architecture do the narrative work—the composition itself becomes the confession, the editing pace the emotional restraint that defines both character and historical moment.
The film's power lives in a single recurring choice: the camera holding on faces just past the moment of reaction, letting us watch people *choosing* to look away, and that decision to linger on the act of concealment rather than the thing being hidden transforms a historical premise into something visceral and immediate.