La Reina
2013 · 18m · Argentina
Directed by Manuel Abramovich
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
A young carnival queen wears a white-and-brown costume and a four-kilo crown, lightened of sequins because it made her head tilt, and holds it high because she looks beautiful in it.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to see a delicate coming-of-age story, but Abramovich's actually made something weirder—a film that treats a carnival queen's vanity and labor with zero irony, no redemptive arc, just a girl holding weight because it makes her feel powerful, and that refusal to judge her is genuinely unsettling.
There's a restraint here that speaks to formal maturity: the decision to let the costume and crown do the narrative work, to trust the viewer's eye rather than manufacture sentiment, recalls the best of post-neorealist portraiture—a film aware it's working in the tradition of bodies and ceremony as text.
The genius move is that four-kilogram crown: by removing the sequins to lighten it, then filming her choice to bear its weight anyway, Abramovich collapses vanity and endurance into a single, devastating gesture—one costume choice that reframes the entire emotional architecture of who this girl is.