La tiricia o como curar la tristeza
2012 · 12m · México
Directed by Ángeles Cruz
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Three generations of women — grandmother Ita, mother Justa, and daughter Alicia — carry 'la tiricia,' a sadness of the soul passed down through tolerated abuse. Alicia decides to break the cycle so as not to pass it to another generation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
On paper this sounds like heavy-handed therapy cinema, but Cruz refuses the confessional moment everyone's waiting for—she lets the women sit in their inheritance without naming it to death, which is genuinely perverse in a way most 'breaking the cycle' narratives aren't brave enough to attempt.
A measured, formally precise study of intergenerational trauma that trusts visual language over exposition; the restraint of Cruz's editing and the deliberate spatial composition of the three women across the frame situates this firmly in a lineage of feminist family portraiture that values observation over melodrama.
The entire film pivots on a single choice—the decision to shoot the women in near-static, overlapping domestic spaces so that their bodies become the landscape—and that formal constraint is what transforms what could be a familiar narrative into something that feels genuinely discovered rather than performed.