El buen samaritano
2019 · 7m · España
Directed by Raúl Mancilla
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In the 1930s, in an endless arid olive grove, a boy who makes his living hunting thrushes and gathering asparagus crosses paths with a dying man, and from that moment nothing is the same for either of them.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a coming-of-age story about a boy to pivot on innocence lost, but Mancilla refuses that comfort—instead he stages a collision between two lives in an olive grove and lets the moral ambiguity hang there, unresolved, which is exactly the kind of stubborn restraint that makes consensus scouts nervous.
The film's geometric framing of that endless grove, the measured pacing that trusts silence, and the way Mancilla positions this encounter within the visual and tonal language of 1930s Spanish cinema—it's a work aware of its own tradition, executing it with the kind of formal discipline that rewards close looking.
The decision to shoot almost entirely in wide shots of that barren landscape, letting the boy and the dying man become small figures within it, transforms what could be maudlin into something austere and true—one compositional choice that makes the whole emotional weight land.