A woman wants to join a swim team.

GABRIELA is used with permission from Evelyn Lorena. Learn more at https://gabrielashortfilm.com.

Directed and written by Evelyn Lorena, who also plays the title role of Gabriela, this hypnotic, dreamy Oscar-longlisted short drama meditates upon the relationship between identity, freedom and self-acceptance through a uniquely poetic lens that endows the struggles of life with beauty, dignity and grace. Gabriela is a young woman from Guatemala, living undocumented for some time in the American South. But she longs to join the swim team of a local country club; she’s a talented athlete, but her circumstances have derailed her from pursuing her dream.

The film’s magic rests on its intimate attention to character and its visual beauty, alternating between Gabriela’s ordinary life, with its small moments and everyday conversation, and gorgeous dreamscapes of reverie. Pensive, softly luminous visuals, with their painterly colors and beautiful image framings, often create subtle but breathtaking pauses of beauty in the storytelling. These introspective moments give us an unusual intimacy with the narrative’s main character, immersing us in her emotional life and her hopes, travails, fears and dreams.

Essentially a character portrait, the storytelling is propelled less by a forward march of events than by Gabriela’s internal struggle between the circumstances of her life, her desire to be more than them and the existential dissonance that sometimes creates. Lorena’s understated, beautifully lived-in performance captures a young woman who just is — she isn’t just an undocumented dreamer, a Latina living in tenuous circumstances, a daughter or a girlfriend. She is deeply, fully human — a searcher who wants to resolve the tension between who she wants to be and who the world sees her. To do that, she must find a sense of self-acceptance, one that comes from facing her raw emotions head-on and taking in the love and wisdom of the person who has, at times, represented her worst fears of herself.

In representing this quest for self-acceptance, GABRIELA is a poetic and unusually wholehearted film, one that takes Sofia Coppola-style atmospherics and applies them to a subject matter and character very different from Coppola’s own oeuvre. The gift of this particular story is how it captures something of Gabriela’s soul — one that feels, suffers and loves, even in the face of heartbreaking disappointment. Her ability to dream and yearn is what makes her feel so fully human on the screen, reminding us that we are more than our circumstances, our physical markers or the perceptions put on us. We are as deep as oceans and as wide as horizons, and just as difficult to contain.