Boyplay
2017 · 13m · España
Directed by Edgar Burgos
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark
A group of children, tired of the abuse they suffer from other schoolmates, decide to challenge them to a life-or-death match during break time. Years later, an old man remembers how the result of that confrontation determined the course of his later life.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A coming-of-age that ditches the maudlin nostalgia trap entirely—instead it asks what happens when kids stop being victims and choose violence as their only language, then refuses to let you feel good about it. Burgos treats the premise without winking, and that commitment to the uncomfortable is exactly why it sticks.
The film's structural choice to frame childhood brutality through the lens of aged reflection draws clear lineage to Vigo and early Truffaut, though the execution feels slightly underdeveloped—the tonal distance between the match itself and the remembrance could use sharper editorial distinction to truly crystallize the thematic weight.
What elevates this beyond familiar school-trauma territory is Burgos's decision to hold on the children's faces *during* the confrontation without flinching or intercutting to safety—that refusal to look away forces the viewer into complicity and transforms a modest premise into something genuinely unsettling on a shoestring.