Santa
2014 · 21m · Argentina
Directed by Carlos Vilaró Nadal
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Lourdes, a teenager from a very conservative religious family in Yerba Buena, Tucumán, is discovered by her mother kissing her friend Agostina, and her mother turns to faith to try to 'cure' her homosexuality, forcing Lourdes to choose between Agostina's love and God's.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the faith-versus-identity story to break one way or the other, but Nadal refuses the catharsis — he just lets Lourdes sit in the unbearable middle, which is genuinely unsettling in a way the premise doesn't promise.
A restrained piece of social realism that positions itself firmly in the lineage of Spanish-language coming-of-age cinema; the formal distance between camera and subject becomes its own statement about how institutions enforce silence.
The real architecture of this film lives in the sound design and negative space — watch how Nadal uses the mother's prayer as a physical presence in the room, turning faith itself into an acoustic pressure that never needs to be named directly.