NO TODAS SOMOS PENÉLOPE
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Belén Hernández Grande
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A lonely woman takes to the train station as a spectator of life, confessing the fears she feels as oppression — unaware that others observe her routines enough to turn her into the protagonist of a song.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a solid inversion of the spectator/spectacle binary, but the execution lands more elegantly than it subverts—the song-as-revelation feels like a neat twist rather than something that genuinely upends your assumptions about who gets to be seen.
Hernández Grande threads a precise lineage here—the flâneuse essay tradition colliding with neo-realist observation—and the formal choice to let others' attention become her narrative arc is the kind of considered gesture that justifies the three-minute form entirely.
That moment the camera shifts from her watching the station to the realization that strangers have been watching *her* unfold—and that this invisibility gets transformed into song—hinges on a single edit that feels like it costs nothing and changes everything about what we thought the film was doing.