A young woman’s sense of reality becomes an illusion as she struggles with her internal conflicts

European films often have their particular way to tell a story, and are typically not afraid to bend the boundaries of comprehension. Spanish director Aleix Buch’s ‘Hope’ easily skips along those lines, where the fragmented story harnesses mind and reality. The film revolves around Claudia Recher, a young woman who has lived a horrible situation. Her sense of reality becomes an illusion as she struggles to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked life. The last witness of innocence and her internal conflicts. HOPE closely examines the very idea of sensibility and identity, memory, perception —. If that sounds a little obscure, well, the movie is designed as an enigmatic experience, to be absorbed, felt, puzzled over, free-associated about and reconsidered while you’re watching it and then for a good while afterwards.

I don’t believe that narrative works when it’s trying to teach a lesson, or speak a factual truth. What it’s good for is, an exploration of something that’s commonplace and universal. If you can thoroughly explore some nuance and what’s universal about something, then that to me is what narrative is for.

We are also used to narratives coming to an end in some way and having some resolution and conclusion, and exploration isn’t always going to have that, and maybe it never does. These endings are sometimes artificial.

We’ve got a story where characters are being affected by a kidnapping through his own point of view. They are having a hard time understanding their own personal narrative because it’s been built wrong, and they are trying to follow through on something that is potentially built wrong.

For Claudia in particular, she is trying to reconstruct her own life, trying to survive. To do it [that] she’s breaking out of her reality, and creating a new one — but even that one is false in some way.

Without cathartic conversations in order to explain his past, the character transmitted what he is suffering through their expressions. Unable to establish any kind of emotional attachment, this makes Nikolaus an animal following his instincts as a release devise. His guilt becomes his torment, in a prison with bars that it is impossible to escape.

The way this short film ends it shows that there is fear and ambiguity in her resolution’s story. And everything about the short film — the music, the cinematography, Júlia’s performance — all of it are conveying that.