Luna
2016 · 10m · España
Directed by Carola Roberti, Marco Fettolini
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
In the subsoil of Madrid's Malasaña district lives a small albino cockroach, rejected by the other cockroaches for her colour and trapped living in a jar, dreaming that one day her life could be better.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a cockroach tale to be gross-out body horror or cynical satire—instead Roberti and Fettolini went tender and mythic, which is the most subversive move possible.
The film's restraint in animation—spare color palette, deliberate pacing—situates itself cleanly in a European arthouse lineage; the jar as a formal frame-within-frame recalls Švankmajer's obsessive precision.
The decision to render the other cockroaches as indifferent silhouettes rather than individualized antagonists shifts the entire emotional weight onto Luna's internal longing—one formal choice that collapses sentimentality into something genuinely haunting.