Coptos
2011 · 16m · España
Directed by Álvaro Sau
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Farid is 33 years old; after years of bad life, he left his post at the McDonald's where he worked and retired to the desert; in the arid valley of Ryan, far from Cairo, from the revolution, from the world, he drives his tractor and prays.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A guy quits McDonald's to pray in the desert — sure, fine, but Sau doesn't interrogate the escape fantasy or complicate the spiritual retreat with anything that actually *questions* it; it's sincere in a way that feels almost defanged.
Sau positions this withdrawal as a formal study in negative space and repetition, situating Farid's solitude within a lineage of contemplative cinema that trusts duration and landscape to do the philosophical work — the tractor becomes both livelihood and rhythm, a measured gesture toward what cinema can hold without explanation.
The decision to frame Farid's spiritual practice through the mechanical routine of tractor work — the way Sau lets the engine's pulse become indistinguishable from prayer — turns a modest premise into something that reveals character through *action* rather than declaration, and that economy of means is what makes it resonate.