Mati Carmela y Anabel
2022 · 3m · España
Directed by Miguel A. Almanza
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative
A conversation between Mati, Carmela and Anabel, who does not find herself very integrated in the line of thought that the conversation of her 'friends' has.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Three minutes of people talking past each other sounds like therapy-speak hell, but Almanza's refusal to resolve Anabel's isolation—no cathartic breakthrough, no tidy lesson—actually respects the messiness of how friendships fail in real time.
The formal restraint here echoes a lineage of intimate ensemble cinema, though the piece sits slightly outside tradition; what grants it standing is how deliberately the editing maintains spatial distance between Anabel and the others, a compositional choice that becomes the film's entire argument.
The singular move is Almanza's decision to keep Anabel's camera angle slightly off from the conversational rhythm of the others—not alienating her visually so much as placing her in a subtly different temporal pocket, and that one framing choice transforms a simple premise into something genuinely unsettling.