Alçar el vol (alzar el vuelo)
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Jaume gonzalez Pascual
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Esther dreams of writing a short that expresses her feelings for Valencia but cannot capture them on screen, until her friend Raúl introduces her to the ideal person to help her take flight.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A meta-film about making a film about a city—cute premise, but it plays it so straight and earnest that it never *becomes* the thing it's describing; the subversion is buried so deep it suffocates.
Gonzalez Pascual understands the formal language of the coming-of-age essay-film: there's a measured pacing and a clear debt to the European arthouse tradition of city-cinema-as-self-discovery, though the execution remains competent rather than revelatory.
The decision to let Valencia itself become the third character—shot with such specificity and tactile attention that we feel Esther's struggle to *frame* it before we hear it explained—is what justifies the whole conceit; that visual intimacy is where this film actually takes flight.