El billarista
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Sergi Pitarch Garrido
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Paco is passionate about billiards. Between work shifts and miles of road, he finds in each local tournament a small refuge where time stops and the balls roll again — what matters isn't winning, but the gesture, the precision, the calm that only billiards gives him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a sports film that refuses the underdog-triumph playbook entirely—Paco doesn't need to win, doesn't need vindication, just needs the table to exist. That's genuinely weird in the best way, and everyone else will miss it because they're looking for a comeback arc.
Pitarch Garrido locates himself in the lineage of contemplative portraiture and spatial cinema, where the billiard table becomes a study in geometry and human stillness—formally measured, with the patience of Bresson and the melancholy of contemporary European shorts.
The decision to make the camera inhabit the geometry of the table itself—watching Paco's hands and face refracted through the precision of angles and felt—turns a three-minute film into something that justifies its own existence with a single formal choice.