Ciudadanos
2017 · 15m · España
Directed by Marc Nadal
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
In a Spain of daily evictions, families left homeless, police charges against citizens and an unresolved economic crisis, the lack of work pushes citizens into an emergency situation, confronting them with each other and awakening their own selfishness to survive. Citizens such as Noe suffer the absence of effective laws.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Nadal's setup feels too earnest—economic crisis, evictions, moral decay—it's the kind of socially conscious premise that festivals eat up without question, which is exactly why I'm suspicious of it; the film needs to earn its darkness rather than inherit it from the news cycle.
A formally composed essay on collective crisis and moral fracture that locates itself squarely within the Spanish social realist tradition; Nadal's restraint in tone and structure—contemplative rather than didactic—suggests a filmmaker thinking carefully about how cinema can witness systemic failure without reducing it to sentiment.
The real work here is in the sound design and the spaces between confrontations—there's a specific choice to let silence and ambient urban noise carry the weight of desperation instead of overlaying it with score, which is what transforms what could be agitprop into something that actually breathes.