Randa 1976
2021 · 22m · España
Directed by Alberto Prados, Laura Río
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Manuel, a young sailor of humble origins from Torremolinos, falls in love with Randa, a Swedish girl who came to the Costa del Sol on vacation in the summer of 1976. An intense relationship that ends like almost all summer loves: with separate ways.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to see 'summer romance in Spain' and think they know what this is—but Prados and Río aren't interested in nostalgia porn or that tired meet-cute energy; they're making something colder and more honest about how class and nationality actually corrode desire, and most scouts will miss that entirely.
A precise formal study in the aesthetics of Mediterranean melancholy—the 1976 specificity isn't decoration but scaffold, and the measured pacing (22 minutes that feel like a single held breath) recalls the restraint of early Haneke or the Dardenne brothers, situating itself deliberately in a lineage of drama that trusts silence over sentiment.
The entire film hinges on one choice: shooting the separation not as a climactic tearful scene but as a mundane logistics problem—tickets, timing, a missed connection—and that single reframing does all the work of making a familiar premise feel like watching something real collapse under the weight of ordinary circumstance.