Laura despierta
2007 · 6m · Argentina , España
Directed by Diego Sabanés
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Laura wakes up on a Sunday morning and tries to order her memories of the night before, but the messages on her phone are of little help — and perhaps what she needs to sort out is not the past, but the future.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A phone-as-memory device is almost a cliché at this point, but Sabanés makes the bored decision to actually *trust* the ambiguity — he doesn't resolve the mystery or flatten Laura into a tidy emotional arc, which is genuinely rare in short form.
The film positions itself quietly in the lineage of introspective European cinema, using the Sunday-morning-after as a formal container for temporal collapse; its restraint and refusal of exposition recall Kiarostami's phenomenological approach to narrative.
The genius move is treating the phone messages as *unreliable narration without comment* — Sabanés never cuts to flashbacks or reconstructs the night, just lets Laura (and us) sit in the gap between what happened and what the texts suggest, and that structural patience is what makes six minutes feel like a complete psychological study.