Vanesa
2022 · 27m · España
Directed by Juan Espinosa de los Monteros
Tones: contemplative, tender
Vanesa, a young woman who suffers from Myoclonic Dystonia, opens her heart shortly before facing a difficult operation, discovering through her experiences and feelings that there is a positive way to face life, with love and courage.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A medical-drama redemption arc about facing surgery with courage—it's the kind of well-intentioned, consensus-friendly premise that makes me itch. Where's the subversion, the narrative risk, the thing that makes you actually *uncomfortable*?
Espinosa de los Monteros channels the intimate realism of contemporary European cinema, situating Vanesa in a lineage of character-driven shorts that honor both vulnerability and formal restraint—27 minutes earned, not a frame wasted on sentimentality.
The film's power lives in how it lets Vanesa's involuntary movements *be*—refusing to sanitize or overdramatize dystonia—and that compositional choice, that decision to let her body speak without explanation, transforms a straightforward medical narrative into something genuinely tender and unsettling.