Valentina
2018 · 5m · España
Directed by Pablo Uriarte
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In a Galician fishing village during the Virgen del Carmen procession, a mother carries her daughter Valentina to the shore every day. They sit facing the sea, waiting, as the festival around them celebrates the patron who protects sailors from storms.
Picked by Margot
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Everyone's going to read this as a grief study, and sure, it probably is—but what actually gets me is how Uriarte refuses to resolve anything, lets the ritual just *sit* there alongside the celebration, utterly indifferent to narrative closure. That's the kind of deadpan subversion that masquerades as minimalism.
Valentina positions itself in a lineage of European contemplative cinema—the restrained compositional sense recalls Hou Hsiao-hsien, the maternal vigil echoes Koreeda—and executes that tradition with genuine formal rigor: the editing breathes, the procession becomes background, and the sea remains opaque and indifferent, as it should.
The entire film hinges on Uriarte's decision to keep the camera static and let the daughter's stillness do the emotional work; that single choice—the refusal to cut closer or dramatize—transforms what could've been maudlin into something honest and almost unbearable.