‘Piret’ film wins best short film award at Amsterdam festival
Visual artist and composer Julián De La Chica has created PIRET as his third film, yet it stands as the first he has shot completely on film stock. The accompanying trailer pulls viewers in with its score of organs, repetitions, winds and unusual acoustic effects that gradually form an existential chaos. From the start, PIRET points to a realm of suspense, emptiness and loss, along with the abyss that De La Chica frequently references in discussions of his art. These elements tie into the recurring themes that run through his entire practice, including memory, displacement, solitude, repetition, mortality and the unstable space between events and their remnants, as previously seen in works like Agatha. The mediums change. The questions do not.
The film portrays the experience of a young Estonian immigrant single mother rebuilding her life in 1970s New York after departing Soviet Estonia. Rather than relying on overt statements about displacement, PIRET conveys her situation through quieter means such as solitude, work, fractured encounters and the ongoing sensation of residing in a place without ever completely arriving. What begins as an immigrant narrative slowly transforms into a more elusive exploration of identity's instability. Individuals come and go, meetings recur with slight changes, sounds seem unconnected to their sources, and time shifts without notice. The line between memory, premonition and reality grows uncertain, making PIRET a film that functions according to memory's own logic instead of merely describing it.
Anni Jürgenson delivers the lead performance as Piret, bringing an instinctive understanding that rarely declares the character's emotions outright. Her gestures, pauses and silences build until the inner life emerges as a tangible presence. Colombian singer and activist Chico Raro supports as Maestra Gertrudis, a pseudo-fortune teller who introduces a touch of Amazonian mysticism into the austere setting. Their interaction adds an eccentric, theatrical quality reminiscent of Almodóvar. Cinematographer Liliet Reyes crafted an austere yet intimate look, with Anyelo Troya handling the 16mm camera work to incorporate the medium's grain, darkness and negative space. Colorist Ignacio Cabrera refined the black-and-white palette into a tactile, spectral quality using Kodak Double-X Super 16mm stock.
Silence serves as the film's primary narrative language rather than a mere absence. Sound designer Kevin Yang constructs an acoustic environment where sounds often arrive without clear origins and silence feels deliberately built. During post-production, a movement from De La Chica's string quartet cycle After Beauty integrated into the film's emotional structure. This addition occurred even though the quartets predated the film project. The music shares a psychological vocabulary with PIRET, creating a collision rather than traditional scoring, so that the music appears to remember the film instead of explaining it.
PIRET has earned recognition at festivals, including two Awards of Recognition at the 17th IndieFEST Film Awards for Anni Jürgenson's leading performance and Kevin Yang's sound design, as well as the Best Short Film award at the Amsterdam New Cinema Film Festival. Beyond these honors, the film leaves viewers with a lingering residue of uncertainty. Images persist without immediate explanation, sounds gain meaning later, and characters exist as people, memories and projections at once. The uncertainties keep reorganizing after the viewing ends, reflecting how memory omits, exaggerates and rearranges to sustain identity.
PIRET fits within De La Chica's ongoing exploration of memory, displacement, solitude and mortality, themes that also marked his award-winning first film Agatha. In this new work they take a darker, more elusive shape. De La Chica serves as writer, director, editor and composer, a combination that allows his composer's sense of duration and silence to shape the cinema while his visual instincts inform the music. The result deepens rather than dilutes the work across disciplines, with the film acting as a clear expression of this unified artistic language.
