El gigante y la sirena
2017 · 15m · España
Directed by Roberto Chinet
Tones: contemplative, tender
In the middle of the night, eight-year-old Marcos, ill with leukaemia, with one leg amputated and using a wheelchair, sets out for room 23 unseen. The goal is to read a story to a woman in deep coma.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be maudlin—sick kid, coma patient, midnight quest—but Chinet refuses the tear-jerking machinery entirely, which is either profound restraint or perverse contrariness, and honestly I'm not sure which and I kind of love that.
The film's economy of gesture—a wheelchair moving through hospital corridors, the formal stillness of the comatose woman, a story offered into silence—sits squarely in a lineage of European humanist cinema that knows better than to sentimentalize vulnerability.
The decision to keep the camera at Marcos's eye level throughout transforms what could've been patronizing into something radically intimate; we're not watching a child protagonist, we're *there*, in the wheelchair, moving through a space that's simultaneously domestic and otherworldly.