Roberto
2020 · 10m · España
Directed by Carmen Córdoba
Genres: drama, romance, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
15 years have passed and Roberto is still in love with his neighbour, although she prefers to hide, ashamed of her body. With his art and an old clothesline as his only form of communication, Roberto has a plan to get his beloved to face her monsters once and for all.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Roberto is trying very hard to be a tender fable about unrequited love, but the surrealism feels obligatory—a clothesline-as-communication device that wants to be profound without earning it. The body-shame angle has been done to death, and wrapping it in magical realism doesn't subvert the sentiment, it just softens it.
Córdoba works in the tradition of magical-realist cinema with genuine restraint—the clothesline becomes a formal constraint that mirrors the film's thematic preoccupation with visibility and concealment. There's a lineage here (Buñuel, early Guillermo del Toro) that she handles with respect, even if the execution doesn't quite transcend its influences.
The decision to make the clothesline itself the primary visual language—the only medium Roberto has to speak—is where this film lives; Córdoba commits fully to that single formal constraint, building emotional weight through repetition and small variations in how fabric moves, and that restraint is what makes the melancholy actually land instead of sentimentalize.