Una Vez
2015 · 13m · Algeria
Directed by Sonia Madrid, María Guerra
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
On an ordinary day, Chila Huerta wakes her three children and abandons the house she shares with her husband, leaving their town to wonder what happened — and why.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the reveal—affair, abuse, breakdown—but Madrid and Guerra just let her leave, and somehow that refusal to psychologize is more unsettling than any explanation would be; the film trusts the audience to sit with ambiguity instead of solving it.
A formally restrained portrait of departure that positions itself alongside the Latin American cinema of moral complexity; the measured pacing and the studied distance from Chila's interiority recall a deliberate lineage of films about women's unannounced exits—precise editing that resists melodrama.
The entire film hinges on the sound design in those first minutes—the ordinary domesticity of breakfast, footsteps, a door closing—and by refusing any musical accompaniment or voiceover, the directors make silence itself do the storytelling work that other films would dump into exposition.