Love
2024 · 7m · Mexico
Directed by Isabel Vaca
Genres: coming-of-age, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Maria and Lea are longtime best friends, but Lea harbors unspoken romantic feelings she cannot bring herself to voice. Told entirely without dialogue — the audience hears only Maria's voice recounting small shared memories — the film captures the precise texture of loving someone from a distance they don't know exists.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A seven-minute film with no dialogue that somehow makes unrequited love feel more precise than most features — the formal constraint does all the emotional heavy lifting.
Isabel Vaca traps the viewer inside an unrequited lover's voiceover that the other character literally cannot hear — a precise formal device for queer longing, in the lineage of Céline Sciamma's quiet apparatus.
Stripping all dialogue while using the unrequited lover's voice as the only audio — the other character literally cannot hear the longing. At seven minutes that's a precise, contained formal device for an emotion that usually gets bloated.
Festivals
- Tribeca Film Festival 2024