Fuga
2014 · 16m
Directed by Juan Antonio Espigares
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, musical
Tones: contemplative, surreal, theatrical
Sara, newly arrived at St Cecilia's Conservatory, discovers there are different ways to interpret each side of the prism through which she perceives her reality and talent.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A coming-of-age film about musical awakening that actually commits to the *surreal* part—rejecting the expected biopic shape in favor of something genuinely disorienting, where talent isn't a thing you find but a prism you shatter and reassemble.
Espigares positions this within a rich tradition of musical-animation hybrids (think early Svankmajer, the formalist lineage) while executing with remarkable formal discipline—the editing architecture supporting the metaphor of fragmented perception is where the real argument happens.
The singular choice here is treating the conservatory itself as a living, shape-shifting entity through animation rather than a static backdrop—one decision that dissolves the boundary between Sara's internal crisis and external world, making a modest runtime feel architecturally complete.