Back Then
2016 · 3m · España
Directed by Diego Porral
Genres: comedy, family, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, tender, whimsical
When a child asks his father how he met his mother, he becomes caught in a dispute between two parents who cannot agree on the version of events, while his small child's imagination deforms reality as he fails to understand their expressions and metaphors.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent riff on unreliable narration, but the premise—dueling parent perspectives filtered through a kid's misunderstanding—feels like it's been workshopped into safety; I wanted the film to commit harder to the actual weirdness of how children *genuinely* distort language and logic, not just play it cute.
Porral demonstrates formal control in how the visual language shifts between the parents' competing accounts, a technique with roots in films like *Rashomon*, though the execution here feels more whimsical pastiche than rigorous interrogation of narrative reliability.
The single choice that makes this work is how the child's literal interpretations of metaphors—the actual *visual manifestations* of 'sweeping her off her feet' or whatever—become the film's grammar; that one decision to treat misheard language as cinematic fact elevates what could've been a one-note gag into something genuinely tender.