Maria
2018 · 10m · Indonesia , República Checa
Directed by Giovanni Rustanto
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, mystery
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A quiet girl has a dispute with her mother and ends up entering a monastery to become a nun; upon her arrival, she is given a new name, Maria, and a mysterious past behind her rebellious acts is revealed.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's gonna see a pious coming-of-age story, but Rustanto's actually made a film about how institutions rename you into compliance—the mystery angle is just the Trojan horse for something genuinely unsettling about belonging.
A formally composed meditation on threshold and renunciation that sits comfortably in the lineage of Bresson and Tarkovsky; the restraint in performance and mise-en-scène reveals rather than explains, which is exactly the kind of considered storytelling that separates real cinema from sentiment.
The choice to withhold the mother's face until the monastery sequence is small but devastating—it forces the camera to read Maria's silence instead, and suddenly you understand that her quietness isn't personality, it's a survival language being translated into prayer.