El baile de los infantes
2016 · 9m · España
Directed by Javier Dampierre, Jokin Pascual
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
In Pamplona, children spend the whole year waiting for summer and the San Fermín running of the bulls, dreaming of the day they will be old enough to run it themselves.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a tender documentary about kids waiting to run with bulls—which sounds like the safest, most consensus-approved premise imaginable, but Dampierre and Pascual somehow extract genuine strangeness from the anticipation itself, letting the whimsy curdle just enough to avoid pure sentimentality.
A formally composed meditation on childhood ritual and the passage into adulthood, situated squarely in the European documentary tradition of observing cultural continuity; the tender pacing and contemplative editing position it as a measured argument about generational inheritance rather than a celebration of spectacle.
The real coup is how they've chosen to film waiting itself—the decision to linger on the children's faces and the quieter moments of rehearsal rather than the actual running creates an almost unbearable intimacy that makes the San Fermín less about danger and more about the singular ache of not-yet-belonging.