Creciendo deprisa
2023 · 4m · España
Directed by Sergio Barba
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A child grows up while life moves on around them, in a reflection on how fleeting childhood is — each stage lived thinking about the future rather than the present.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a sincere meditation on childhood's transience — which means it's exactly what everyone expects a coming-of-age short to be, and Barba seems perfectly fine with that. Pass; I need the film that makes me defend it at a dinner party, not nod along.
Barba positions himself squarely in the lineage of Boyhood-inflected reflection on time's passage, and the discipline of the edit—how each stage is held, released, measured against the next—suggests a director thinking formally about what a four-minute lifetime can contain.
The choice to keep the child's interiority almost entirely absent, letting us watch someone *not* present in their own moments, is elegant and specific; it's a single structural decision that reframes the whole project from sentimental to genuinely unsettling.