Mal de Madre
2024 · 22m · Spain
Directed by Irene Baqué
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
During Lagartera's Corpus Christi procession, Lita parades her great-grandmother's century-old dress and confronts an inherited superstition about lizards and menstruation, caught between sacred tradition and her own fears.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most docs about inherited tradition just genuflect respectfully—Baqué flips the script by letting superstition and the body speak louder than reverence, which is genuinely heretical in a Spanish Catholic context and makes the whole thing deliciously uncomfortable.
Baqué's formal rigor—the way she braids documentary observation with surrealist undercurrents while holding the Corpus Christi procession's own visual grammar intact—situates this squarely in a lineage of anthropologically precise, formally ambitious nonfiction that interrogates ritual from within.
The decision to let Lita's superstitious anxiety manifest as surreal imagery rather than confessional voiceover is the hinge: it elevates what could've been a straightforward coming-of-age doc into something visually and emotionally singular on a modest budget.