Volant
2015 · 17m · España
Directed by Raquel Pérez Crego
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
A 36-year-old business graduate sharing a flat in A Coruña and working as a waitress loses her job, and under pressure from everyone around her she decides to pursue her true vocation: painting.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A 36-year-old waitress choosing painting over stability sounds like every MFA thesis ever made—except Pérez Crego commits the radical act of treating it as genuinely unglamorous, a slog nobody's romanticizing, which is almost interesting enough to forgive how safe the premise ultimately plays it.
The film's measured pacing and attention to the small humiliations of precarity situate it firmly in the European realist tradition, though it lacks the compositional precision or formal originality that would elevate it beyond a competent exercise in the coming-of-age mode.
What saves this is Pérez Crego's commitment to negative space—the shots of the protagonist alone in her flat, the way she lets silence live longer than comfort allows—a directorial restraint that transforms a familiar script about following your dreams into something genuinely solitary and unresolved.