Acróbatas en el iglú
2019 · 14m · España
Directed by Galar Egüén, Guillermo Malo Fontanillo
Tones: contemplative, tender
Lorena is a young single mother living with her daughter at her parents' house, alongside her rebellious teenage brother; when the little girl falls ill, the family unites to fight external prejudices and their own disagreements, while a film from a famous science-fiction saga threads through their story.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the sci-fi thread to be ironic or cutesy—a postmodern wink at genre—but Egüén and Fontanillo let it breathe as genuine emotional scaffolding for a family falling apart, which is exactly the kind of counterintuitive move that makes most people uncomfortable and me obsessed.
The film sits firmly in the Latin American social-realist tradition while resisting melodrama through formal restraint; the decision to let a Hollywood artifact become the emotional through-line is a studied choice that positions it in dialogue with both neorealist cinema and contemporary hybrid modes.
The single masterstroke is how they use the sci-fi film's presence—not dialogue, not plot, but the *watching itself* as the moment where this fractured family finds temporary coherence; it's a technical and emotional economy that does genuine work on a nothing budget.