“It’s you”, the young main character of the short film The darkness that you fear repeats to herself in front of the mirror, awarded at  NOTODO Film Fest, sponsored by Atresmedia and the Spanish Association for the Fight against Cancer. That final scene shows the first time that Melissa Morán, an actress and director from Murcia, looked at herself after the mastectomy she underwent in September 2021. “I didn’t want to look at me. My sister helped me to shower because I didn’t want to see myself, but making this project helped me to face my body without a breast », tells Melissa. That is why the scene takes your breath away with the stampede of emotions that overwhelm the young filmmaker in the difficult moment of facing her new reality.
Recounting the experience of breast cancer in 3.5 minutes may seem as impossible as forgetting this short film, in which the actress has narrated her experience to the surface of her skin. Melissa has filtered a tone of intimate authenticity in the story, which breathes the eternity of forced rest, the anguish of the future, the impulse to survive.

Only the shooting became an odyssey. She was convalescing as she was in her house in Santiago de la Ribera, she was forced to “deceive a group of friends,” who worked as camera operators, photographers, and illuminators. When she decided to participate in the film festival, “there were two weeks left until the application deadline and I had to make it compatible with the times when I felt strong,” she tells about the production in full chemotherapy treatment. She enlisted the help of 12 friends, but at the last moment the person who was going to edit it backed down and Melissa had to draw strength from that hidden warehouse where human beings keep a reserve for decisive moments. “I had to take over the editing, not sleeping for 24 hours and not stopping to see the same images,” she recalls of the final race.