Dulce
2018 · 11m · USA
Directed by Guille Isa, Angello Faccini
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Eight-year-old Dulce must overcome her fear of water to learn to swim, an essential rite of passage in her coastal Colombian village.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
On paper this is exactly the coming-of-age rite-of-passage doc everyone's seen before—kid fears water, kid learns to swim, cue uplift. But there's something genuinely unsettling about how Isa and Faccini let the discomfort breathe; they're not interested in the triumph, only the terror, and that refusal to resolve cleanly is the only thing keeping it from being a tourism board short.
The formal restraint here is exceptional—a documentary that trusts negative space and silence the way a fiction film trusts dialogue, situating itself squarely in the lineage of intimate observational cinema that prizes presence over narrative momentum.
The decision to hold on Dulce's face during the moments she's *not* in the water—the anticipation, the breath—is what transforms this from a straightforward skills narrative into something that actually communicates fear; most directors would cut away or undercut with music, but these two understand that stillness *is* the film.
Reviews
In their coastal Colombian village, this is an essential rite of passage; Iscuandé is dependent on harvesting piangua shellfish, a type of edible mussel that's a delicacy in nearby Ecuador. Besides, says her mother, what will happen to Dulce when the ever-rising seawater drowns the village?