El mundo entero
2016 · 30m · España
Directed by Julián Quintanilla
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: surreal, tender, whimsical
Every year Julián returns to Extremadura to visit his dead mother in Badajoz's old cemetery, where she appears to him and the two make plans together. This year, La Chary has a very special mission for her son, one that will surprise the whole world.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most people would've made this a sappy ghost story or a grief meditation—Quintanilla instead treats his dead mother like a co-conspirator, which is refreshing enough, but the 'special mission' that'll 'surprise the whole world' feels like it's trying too hard to justify the whimsy rather than let it breathe.
A formally assured piece that understands its debt to magical realism as a mode of processing loss; the annual return structure and the cemetery as threshold are well-worn but deployed with restraint, and the tonal balance between the surreal and the tender suggests a filmmaker conscious of not tipping into sentimentality.
The decision to shoot the mother as present and agential rather than ethereal or fragmentary—to make her a planner, a schemer, someone with agency beyond the son's grief—is what transmutes this from personal essay into something genuinely strange and alive.