David & Goliat
2019 · 30m · España
Directed by David López-Zuazo
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
The story of two children with different problems who, through friendship, overcome them — a story showing three realities present today: gender violence, bullying and illegal immigration, framed under the biblical myth of David and Goliath, where the weak can indeed defeat the strong.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
López-Zuazo reaches for the mythic framework and lands in expected territory—gender violence, bullying, immigration all tamed by parable—which is exactly the kind of earnest consensus-building that makes most shorts forgettable, even when they're competent.
The decision to scaffold contemporary social fracture through the David and Goliath archetype is formally assured and deliberate, positioning the film within a lineage of mythic realism that asks cinema to hold both intimacy and historical weight simultaneously.
There's a specific restraint in how López-Zuazo lets the friendship breathe without over-explaining the social problems—the camera stays close to the children's faces and lets the mythic scaffolding do its work in negative space, which is a harder technical choice than it looks at 30 minutes.