La marca
2018 · 27m · España
Directed by Natalia Gómara
Tones: contemplative, theatrical
Aspiring actress Maria Concepcion dreams of a chance to become a great star and live from acting, and faces the hardest test of a career before prestigious casting director Jota Cazatalentos. Eccentric rival actors also fight for the role, and the deepest desire may mark Maria for life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a casting-room satire that could've been a tired thinkpiece about showbiz desperation, but Gómara keeps the theatrical energy so heightened and strange that it becomes something genuinely unhinged—the rivals aren't just quirky, they're operating in a different reality than Maria, which is exactly the kind of tonal subversion that catches people off guard.
Gómara's precision in blocking and timing recalls the mise-en-scène of ensemble comedies that understand performance as formal language; there's a lineage here—from Altman to Reichardt—of films that use the casting room as a space where artifice and desperation collide with rigorous spatial intelligence.
The film lives or dies on the choice to shoot the casting room interactions in real time, letting the awkward silences and overlapping monologues breathe without cutting for easy laughs—it's a decision that elevates what could be sketch comedy into something genuinely claustrophobic and human.