Campo de batalla
2010 · 13m · España
Directed by Fran Casanova
Genres: mystery, thriller, war
During an assault on a Nationalist trench in the Spanish Civil War, young Republican soldier Antonio spots a lost, frightened child and breaks away from his comrades to help him, descending into an underground bunker where a mysterious game of pursuit begins.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A war film that abandons the battlefield the moment it gets interesting—swaps historical brutality for psychological horror in an underground maze where a child becomes the predator and meaning dissolves. Everyone else is making solemn Spanish Civil War dramas; Casanova is making something that shouldn't work but does, because he trusts the uncanny over explanation.
The descent structure echoes a long tradition of war films interrogating trauma through spatial disorientation—think Pasolini's formal rigor applied to genre—but Casanova's editing keeps us permanently unmoored, refusing the catharsis or moral clarity the war-film tradition typically demands of its final act.
The pivot from soldier-saves-child to child-as-threat hinges entirely on a single sound design choice—the shift from muffled surface chaos to clear, pristine audio in the bunker—that reframes the entire power dynamic and makes a 13-minute film on what's likely a shoestring feel architecturally inevitable.