De vuelta
2015 · 13m · España
Directed by Gabriel Dorado
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After two years away, Alex returns to his village with Jordi to celebrate the night of San Juan, in a story about teenage loves of the past.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a homecoming romance that could've been a Hallmark card, but Dorado resists the reunion-triumph arc entirely—there's no catharsis here, just the weight of time and the people we don't become. That refusal to earn the easy ending is exactly the kind of quiet subversion that masquerades as conventional.
De vuelta positions itself deliberately in the Spanish coming-of-age tradition, using the San Juan festival as both setting and formal constraint; the melancholic restraint and temporal architecture—past and present colliding in a single night—shows a filmmaker aware of what tradition demands and how to honor it through understatement.
The film hinges on a single sustained look between Alex and Jordi that reframes everything retrospectively: Dorado lets the camera linger just long enough to collapse two years of absence into recognition, and that choice to trust silence over exposition is what makes a modest premise resonate.