Noviembre, Diciembre
2014 · 27m · España
Directed by Raquel Abellán
Genres: drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark
Hugo, a young writer going through a bad time because no one will publish his books, decides to quit his job when a new story comes to mind — and his obsession with succeeding leads him into a face-to-face fight with himself.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A writer fighting his own shadow self over artistic failure sounds like therapy-speak until Abellán actually materializes the internal war—literalizing psychological collapse into surreal face-off is the kind of subversive genre flip that makes you recalibrate what 'drama' can do.
The film situates itself in a lineage of psychological surrealism that traces back through Buñuel and Vigo, and Abellán's compositional control—the staging of internal conflict as spatial opposition—shows considerable formal maturity in how she contains the abstraction.
The decision to stage Hugo's creative paralysis as an actual physical confrontation with himself rather than voiceover or montage is the hinge on which everything turns; it's a conceptual choice that transforms a familiar struggle into something tactile and rare.