The Essay – Films – Visions du Réel

El ensayo

Carmen Ayala Marín & Alberto Martín Menacho
Switzerland, Spain | 2025 | 12 min
World premiere
Language : Spanish
Subtitles : English, French

In Córdoba, Spain, budding filmmakers and actors from the Federico García Lorca primary school are working on a film project. An idea takes shape… to bring to the screen the story of the Roma people from the Punjab, who have lived in Spain for several centuries and yet are still perceived as foreigners by the local community.

Two artists step through the doors of the Federico García Lorca primary school, nestled in a Roma neighbourhood on the outskirts of Córdoba. Within the school’s walls, Alberto Martín Menacho and Carmen Ayala Marín begin an artistic dialogue with pupils on the threshold of adolescence, exploring how their culture is represented in cinema and painting. Over the course of many months, the duo leads workshops where groups of girls and boys stage, experiment with, and rehearse scenes inspired by Andalusian and Roma traditions. Through conversations and creative enactments, the artists encounter a generation deeply rooted in its history, acutely aware of the marginalisation and stigma its community continues to face. In close exchanges with the students, Carmen and Alberto begin to rethink their own practice — and their relationship to the subjects they film or paint. Their impressionistic camera moves fluidly, seeking to capture individual presences within the collective. The result is a tender, thoughtful essay that steers clear of clichés, shaped by an ongoing reflection on the gaze, and on the nature of the bond between the one filming and the one being filmed.

Katy Léna Ndiaye

Carmen Ayala Marín
The Essay, 2025

Alberto Martín Menacho
The Essay, 2025
Nights Gone by, 2023
My Beloved, the Mountains, 2017
Pata negra, 2015