77
2020 · 7m · España
Directed by Raúl Mancilla
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
During lockdown, a man speaks with his mother by video call every day in the same routine, until one afternoon she asks him for an unexpected favor that breaks the pattern.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A lockdown video-call drama sounds like the most obvious pandemic short imaginable, but Mancilla's refusal to make the break-in-routine feel cathartic or revelatory keeps it genuinely unsettling—it's almost defiant in its restraint.
The film operates within a classical dramatic structure—routine establishing pattern, disruption introducing crisis—yet deploys the video call frame as formal constraint that echoes a lineage of works interrogating distance and presence.
The entire film hinges on Mancilla's decision to hold on the mother's face at the moment of her ask, letting the camera refuse to cut away while the son processes silently—that single held shot transforms routine observation into something quietly devastating.