Mars Love
2017 · 7m · España
Directed by Jorge San Martín, Mario Serrano, Santiago Vélez, Víctor Lorenzo Pinel
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
On the anniversary of first Martian contact with Earth, Martians live as neighbours, friends and lovers inside human society. Austyn and Verde share a love story that crosses half the universe.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects sci-fi romance to be about the alienness, the otherness—Mars Love just... lets them be neighbours, lets the contact be footnote, and somehow that refusal to punch up the premise is exactly what makes it subversive.
The film positions itself carefully within the lineage of humanist SF, drawing from both the romanticism of early space-age cinema and the intimate scale of contemporary short practice; that restraint is formally sophisticated.
The decision to shoot the Martian-human relationship with such quotidian tenderness—no reveal, no conflict, just Verde and Austyn existing in ordinary light—is what transforms a high-concept premise into something that actually moves; that restraint is everything.