Qué Preferirías
2017 · 6m · España
Directed by Alba Chaparro
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Lola, a solitary and sad 70-year-old woman, spends days in a nursing home with a hostile expression. Childhood separation from a best friend after a terrible event left a wound that Lola never overcame.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A nursing home grief portrait sounds like the safest bet in indie cinema, but Chaparro's refusal to sentimentalize Lola's rage—that hostile expression as armor, not pathology—is genuinely unsettling in ways most films of this ilk wouldn't dare attempt.
Chaparro locates herself within a deliberate lineage of intimate European character studies, where restraint becomes the formal statement; the 6-minute architecture around a single wound, never explained or resolved, demonstrates mastery of what to withhold.
The entire film turns on Chaparro's decision to keep Lola's face locked in that expression of refusal—it would be so easy to crack it open, show us softness, but that choice to leave her sealed is what makes the separation's cost actually breathable.