Año bisiesto (Leap Year) is a 2010 Mexican chamber film by Australian-Mexican writer-director Michael Rowe. It follows freelance journalist Laura (Mónica del Carmen) and a hard-to-read stranger, Arturo (Gustavo Sánchez Parra), through an intense, violent sexual relationship that barely leaves one seedy apartment.
Laura is twenty-five. She barely goes out except to pick men up from clubs, and she never lets any of them stay a second night—until Arturo. Their bond deepens across a leap-year February. For adult viewers who watch BDSM or power-sex work, this is art-house SM, not a commercial kink feature. The camera does not look away from two bodies, a calendar, and the escalation between them.
Almost the whole picture stays in that single room. As days pass, Laura crosses dates off the wall calendar and slowly hands Arturo pieces of a secret past. The month on the wall is February in a leap year: the title is not decoration, and the extra day is part of the trap. The psychodrama is the sex and the waiting around the sex. The film tracks how the relationship changes instead of cutting out to a wider city.
Rowe originally wanted the on-screen violence and sexual acts to be real. During the shoot Gustavo Sánchez Parra argued for simulating some of it—filmmaking, he said, is about making people believe the acts are real. Rowe shifted. He later confirmed that only two scenes in the finished film are unsimulated; the rest of the brutality is performance. Even so, the core subject is consensual-looking violence inside a sexual relationship, played in a space too small to hide in.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight on 17 May 2010, then screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival and later at Toronto, Athens, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Mar del Plata, Hong Kong, and Japan’s Latin Beat Film Festival, among others. Producers said it sold in more than thirty countries. In Mexico it played commercial theaters on only twelve copies and drew close to 50,000 spectators—a tiny print run next to large productions that go out with as many as two hundred copies, and a surprisingly wide afterlife for a one-room movie about violent sex.
