El arte de vivir
2023 · 24m · Perú
Directed by Diego Arbulú Barreda
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, musical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Andrés Rodriguez lives in a middle-class neighbourhood of Barranco with his parents. He is a boy passionate about rap and freestyle, but he has problems with his friends, financial difficulties and a not very harmonious relationship with his mother. His only escape valve is music, and he will do everything within his reach to become a successful professional musician.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Look, coming-of-age rap dreams in Lima is not exactly radical—but if Barreda finds the perverse angle in the mother-son friction or lets the freestyle scenes actually *breathe* instead of performing uplift, he might've stumbled into something worth the contrarian's attention.
A tender portrait of artistic aspiration against domestic constraint; the film positions itself within a lineage of Latin American youth cinema that takes music seriously as both escape and identity, and the melancholic tone suggests a filmmaker aware of the formal weight required to earn that restraint.
What matters here is whether Barreda commits to the fugitive moments—a specific beat in a freestyle cipher, the precise silence after a fight with his mother—where the film stops performing a genre and becomes actual lived texture; that's where a 24-minute short on a modest budget either lands or doesn't.