7 Oct 2025
Carla Simón’s Closet Picks
The director of Romería talks about Víctor Erice’s influence on her work, shares how Wanda made her interrogate what feminism really means in cinema, and selects favorites like Umberto D. and Walkabout.
Carla Simón: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest
Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com
This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.
| Chose | Director | Year | Taken by | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |  El Sur | Víctor Erice | 1983 | |
| 2 |  Wanda | Barbara Loden | 1970 | |
| 3 |  Walkabout | Nicolas Roeg | 1971 | |
| 4 |  Umberto D. | Vittorio De Sica | 1952 | |
| 5 |  The Tree of Wooden Clogs | Ermanno Olmi | 1978 | |
| 6 |  Vermiglio | Maura Delpero | 2024 | |
| 7 |  Beau travail | Claire Denis | 1999 | |
| 8 |  Three Films by Mai Zetterling box set, 3 films |
How far across film history it reaches
The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.
How long this haul is
Its 10films run 18.4 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.
That is 138.1 minutes of film for each of its 8 choices, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 375 visits with a complete total, the median is 136.4 minutes.
How unusual this haul was
Its 8 choices had been taken by 5.12 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. One of them has been taken by nobody else. The least-picked was Vermiglio, taken by this visit alone.
This visit reached the work of Claire Denis, through Beau travail and Maura Delpero, through Vermiglio, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.