wasap
2016 · 3m · España
Directed by Carlos Moriana
Genres: drama, experimental, silent
Tones: contemplative, tender
Lucía has a conversation with her boyfriend through WhatsApp, in a black-and-white, dialogue-free homage to the origins of cinema.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Wait, so you're making a silent film about texting? That's either the most boring premise ever or genuinely brilliant, and honestly I'm still not sure which—but the fact that I can't decide means Moriana's onto something.
A deliberate excavation of cinema's earliest grammar through the most contemporary medium of intimacy; the formal constraint (silence, monochrome, WhatsApp's rigid interface) becomes the film's argument about presence and absence, placing it squarely in a lineage of silent-era meditation that feels earned rather than gimmicked.
The choice to let WhatsApp's actual UI carry the emotional weight—those typing indicators, the timestamps, the brutal geometry of message bubbles—transforms a constraint into the entire visual language, and suddenly three minutes of text-based courtship feels more alive than most dialogue-heavy shorts.