Frida, Aleksandra Odić’s latest short movie awarded in 2021 in Cannes with the “Queer Palm” for LGBT+ short movies and the “Lights on Women” Award for rising female directors, is a lukewarm painting of what Lord Alfred Douglas defined the love that dare not speak its name in a poem for Oscar Wilde, which costed the author charges of sodomy and gross indecency and two years of imprisonment in 1895.

The work embodies this definition aesthetically in constituting of silent glimpses and long waits, all immersed in aseptic spaces where the light, reflecting onto the fair surfaces, multiplies and floods the rooms. In fact, the short movie cuts out some cross section of hospital everyday life, telling a “service” relationship which, at first sight, might be forgettable for our attention, and it shows us instead all its hidden profundities of an emotional spectrum ranging from suffering to love. The relationship between the patient Frida and her nurse is attentive, made of meticulous care, and shines everywhere through the small gestures and pleasantries of the hospital routine – still, a quiet tension of mutual desire also shines through, cautiously. This desire displays itself almost like in dreams, following the tenuous hope of being able to be together, in the real light, outside the illness context of suffering wait, and metaphorically outside of a prejudicing context towards their sentimental relationship.

The nurse and the patient canalize the experience of daily resistance in the apnea suspension, both preparing for a challenge oriented to survival and to be able to finally live a simple day going swimming together, and with the hope of taking a breath from the asphyxiating situation of sickness in their society, both physical and metaphorical. Turns out a short movie made of struggle and dispute, where the warmth of fondness, trust in the future and hope for a non-denied kiss goodbye lingers timidly in the merciless places of wait and pain.

Chiara Bardella