La perrera
2017 · 4m · España
Directed by Javier Yáñez Sanz
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
A visual poem about 'La Perrera', a woman who lived with a handsome man much younger than her, whom the neighbours gossiped she had bound to him with witchcraft.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A four-minute poem about witchcraft and coercion dressed up in surrealism—competent, sure, but it's just folk mythology repackaged as experimental when it could've gone genuinely weird with the premise's darker implications.
Yáñez Sanz treats the gossip and legend of La Perrera with painterly restraint, letting visual composition and mythic register do the work of what lesser hands would've made melodramatic—this is formally rigorous poetry cinema in conversation with Spanish folk tradition.
The film hangs entirely on its decision to stay distant and observational rather than psychologize the woman at its center; that withholding of narrative explanation transforms gossip into something closer to portraiture, and it's a choice that justifies the whole four minutes.