Xenia
2021 · 4m · España
Directed by Nacho Herrera
Genres: action, fantasy, sci-fi
In a world where evil lurks in every corner, superheroes are needed to ensure the continuity of our species; Xenia is one of them and she will not stop until she manages to finish off her enemy.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise lands exactly where you'd expect—mythic hero, world-ending stakes, inevitable showdown—and Herrera seems content to play it straight rather than interrogate what superhero narratives even mean anymore. It's competent genre work, but there's no subversion hiding in the corners.
Xenia operates within a lineage of heroic fantasy cinema with formal discipline; the 4-minute runtime enforces a clarity of purpose that recalls the economy of classical short form, though the execution doesn't quite transcend its genre scaffolding into something formally distinctive.
What elevates this on a micro-budget is Herrera's choice to hold on the protagonist's face in moments of doubt rather than cutting away to spectacle—a single performance beat that transforms generic superhero mythology into something intimate and mortal, which is the entire film working.