Alto el fuego
2017 · 21m · España
Directed by Raúl de la Fuente
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In Ciudad Don Bosco, Medellín, the Salesians take in, recover and accompany minors detached from the armed conflict, helping them overcome their traumas and learn a trade so they can re-enter society and reunite with their families.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a war doc about child soldiers to genuflect before trauma and redemption—de la Fuente refuses the catharsis, stays in the unglamorous dailiness of a trade workshop, and lets that mundanity become the real radical act.
A formally precise observational piece that quietly inherits the lineage of humanist documentary—the restraint in not manipulating the boys' narratives, the careful compositional breathing room, positions this within a decades-long tradition of dignity-preserving portraiture.
The film's entire architecture hinges on a single choice: to let the boys' hands—learning, building, steadying—become the throughline instead of their stories, and suddenly a 21-minute doc about reintegration becomes tactile and specific in a way most features never achieve.