Princesas en la niebla
2021 · 5m · España
Directed by Manoli Villarino
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Through a letter to the royal page asking for a princess doll for her father, a girl reveals the abuse she has suffered, in a story based on true events about a child who realises she no longer wants to be her father's little princess.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a heavy-handed PSA about abuse, but Villarino refuses that comfort—the letter conceit lets her bury the horror in a child's specific, devastating logic, and that restraint is somehow more subversive than any explicit approach.
The epistolary form recalls a tradition of intimate testimony in European art cinema, and Villarino's formal control—how she lets the letter's words do the violence while the image stays spare—positions this precisely between confession and performance.
The masterstroke is treating the doll request as a linguistic hinge: that single object becomes the fulcrum where a child's coded language tips from longing into reckoning, and everything pivots on how Villarino lets us hear what she's actually saying.