Como una cabra (Like a goat)
2011 · 8m · España
Directed by Kai Adam
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
As a dying shepherd's last wish, his son José must lead the goat flock from the mountains to the sea, undertaking a difficult journey through Andalusian nature that brings him back to himself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This is exactly the kind of understated, anti-climactic coming-of-age that most festivals would sleepwalk through—and somehow Kai Adam makes the refusal to dramatize the journey feel like the entire point, which is either brilliant restraint or deliberate trolling of the form, and I'm genuinely unsure which.
A film that understands its lineage—the pastoral elegy, the reluctant heir, the redemptive walk—and executes with such formal precision that the goats become a grammar for grief; the Andalusian landscape isn't backdrop but syntax, each cut earning the tenderness without sentiment.
The whole film hinges on a single tonal choice: treating the goat herding not as metaphor but as literal, physical texture—the sound design of hooves on stone, the rhythm of the herd—and suddenly an 8-minute short about duty becomes tactile and alive in a way that justifies every frame.