Valentina Maurel’s I Have Electric Dreams (Tengo sueños eléctricos) is a film charged with the raw electricity of adolescence — a current that pulses through anger, love, and the confusion of growing up in a fractured home. Set in the humid, restless streets of San José, the story follows Eva, a teenage girl navigating the painful split between her parents, her volatile relationship with her father, and the turbulent discovery of her own identity.

Maurel crafts a world that feels both intimate and explosive. Her camera, restless and tactile, lingers close to the skin — capturing sweat, trembling hands, and silent tears. The film refuses to soften the edges of adolescence: instead of nostalgia, we get a portrait of youth as a battlefield between tenderness and violence, self-destruction and yearning. Daniela Marín Navarro’s performance is nothing short of extraordinary; her Eva is fierce, vulnerable, and often unreadable — a living contradiction that feels entirely human.

There’s a physical tension in every scene, a sense that emotion might break into chaos at any moment. The relationship between Eva and her father (played with haunting fragility by Reinaldo Amién Gutiérrez) oscillates between love and rejection, complicity and resentment. Their connection becomes a mirror of generational wounds — the ghosts of masculinity, abandonment, and the unspoken desire to be seen.

Visually, the film embraces a tactile realism. The lighting flickers like the title suggests — electric, unstable — turning ordinary interiors into emotional landscapes. Each moment feels charged with invisible energy, the kind that makes you aware of how feelings inhabit the body.

Beyond its coming-of-age surface, I Have Electric Dreams is about resistance: a young woman reclaiming her own emotional language in a world that demands restraint. It’s a film that vibrates with life — messy, painful, and beautiful — and marks Valentina Maurel as one of the most daring voices in Latin American cinema today.