LIA
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Paula Moreno Rodriguez
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
While removing her makeup, Bruna argues with her boyfriend Xavi over her new friend Lia, and through a series of phone conversations she shows how friendships can differ — raising the question of when a friendship is real.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A phone-argument-over-makeup piece sounds like the kind of safe, millennial-angst territory everyone's already mined to death, and yet Rodriguez refuses to land on an easy answer about what friendship even means—that refusal to moralize is genuinely rare.
The film positions itself within a lineage of intimate, dialogue-driven character studies, and the formal discipline of the makeup removal frame as a containing device—literal and emotional—shows a screenwriter thinking about how cinema holds confession.
The entire film hinges on the tonal shift in Bruna's voice across those phone conversations, and Rodriguez gets it: one modulation of hesitation, one beat of protection, and suddenly you understand the whole architecture of how we perform differently for different people.