Mario Bellatin

In an unnamed city, a beauty salon becomes a space of passage where those cast out gather, suspended between life and death. At its center is the Individuo, a solitary presence who tends to this place without any promises or explanation. The film unfolds as time and place dissolve into one another. What is lived, remembered, and imagined coexists in a continuous movement, where meaning emerges through ritual, drifting, and return. Within this space, beauty and death are intertwined. The salon becomes a threshold where presence and memory fade and reappear, and where the boundaries between reality and vision begin to loosen. The outside world remains fractured, its tensions quietly permeating the space. As everything shifts, what emerges is a passage: a meditation on the fragility of existence.

Vienna, 2019 – the end of an era. The smoking ban in public places means that a part of Kaffeehaus culture has disappeared. Of all moments, this is the one that Angeliki chooses to buy an apartment with help from her interior designer friend, Carmen. Angeliki seems to have something against all of them: either the parquet floors creak, the tiles are the wrong colour or she is bothered by the proximity to a restaurant. How will she ever find a new home in this environment? Carmen feels like she’s talking to a brick wall. Moreover, she simply cannot understand why Angeliki is refusing to part with her money. A Journey from Vienna to Malaga, via salt flats overcast by mysterious shadows. A homage to the Austrian capital and the bygone splendour in ordinary things.

Enigmatic and deceptively playful in tone, this film from Gabino Rodríguez, in collaboration with Nicolás Pereda, boldly transforms mundane, realist observations at a rural Mexican schoolhouse into fantasy and a sly comment on childhood, rituals, and race.