El Árbol de las almas perdidas
2019 · 16m · España
Directed by Laura Zamora
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Lili, an introverted eleven-year-old girl, sees her world crumble with the disappearance of her father, her mother's indifference toward her, betrayal in friendship and disappointment in love.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A competent grief-and-adolescence story that hits every expected beat—absent father, cold mother, friend betrayal, first heartbreak—without finding a single angle that makes you reconsider what coming-of-age *means*. Zamora's got control, but control without provocation is just craft.
Zamora situates herself within a lineage of Spanish-language coming-of-age cinema with formal precision—the melancholic tone and contemplative pacing show a filmmaker aware of her tradition—though the film's emotional architecture, while competent, doesn't quite transcend the well-worn grammar it inherits.
The decision to let silences and still frames carry the weight of Lili's isolation, rather than score or voiceover, creates a tactile interiority that turns a familiar premise into something quietly particular—Zamora trusts space in a way that elevates the material's modest scope.