Nana
2013 · 10m · España
Directed by Alberto Santaella Gallego
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A family must face the difficult decision of what to do with Nana, as living together grows harder while their emotional bonds remain too strong to break.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent family-drama furniture—exactly the kind of tasteful, emotionally legible stuff that wins regional festivals and puts audiences to sleep. There's nothing here that breaks the mold or makes you question what cinema can do with the premise of eldercare.
Santaella positions this in the lineage of intimate European family portraiture—there's a formal restraint and tonal precision that recalls Haneke's slower registers, though the film doesn't quite earn its silence. The compositional choices are considered, but they don't accumulate into something that justifies the restraint.
The film's entire emotional architecture hinges on one recurring gesture—the way Nana's family members occupy the same frame but turn away from each other—and that single formal choice transforms what could've been TV-movie sentiment into something genuinely aching and specific.