A Todos Nos Pasa
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Alba Rubio Jiménez
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Two friends chat in the park while one of them drifts into his own thoughts, not listening to the conversation.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a three-minute film about two people in a park—exactly the kind of invisible-ink premise that should bore me, and yet Rubio's refusal to punch up the melancholy or manufacture drama is almost antagonistically restrained, which is its own kind of provocation.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of minimalist European portraiture, though its emotional register—the drift between listening and thinking—feels more observed than formally interrogated; competent, but without the rigor that would make it linger.
The entire film hinges on the choice to let the camera linger on the listener's face during the other's monologue, letting stillness and micro-expression do the work of absence—it's a decision so simple and so precise that it transforms a walking-and-talking into something genuinely interior.