Pecas
2018 · 3m · España
Directed by Albert Murillo
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Alba, a girl whose whole body is covered in moles, boards the metro used to people's stares and lives through a scene straight out of a film.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A sensitive coming-of-age study about a girl with moles boarding the metro—it's exactly the kind of gentle, consensus-friendly premise that makes me want to look away, though Murillo's restraint and the film's refusal to performative vulnerability almost wins me over.
Murillo situates this within a lineage of European metro-based character studies—the formal economy of three minutes and the careful composition of strangers' gazes invoke a particular tradition of observational cinema that values what's unsaid.
The entire film pivots on a single formal choice: the decision to shoot from Alba's perspective in the metro car, letting the camera linger on other passengers' faces rather than her own, which reframes the whole story from self-consciousness into quiet defiance.