el nórdico
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Paco Anaya
Tones: humorous, melancholic
Jaime has been dumped by his boyfriend from Helsinki, the cold has arrived, and his mother recommends he watch a tutorial on how to put on a duvet.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A three-minute film about a breakup and a duvet tutorial could've been a Hallmark greeting card, but Anaya somehow weaponizes domesticity against sentimentality—the real subversion isn't the premise, it's the refusal to make the mother's advice feel like wisdom.
Anaya positions this within a lineage of Northern European melancholia and queer domestic cinema, where the mundane tutorial becomes formal structure; the restraint in not overselling the emotional stakes demonstrates considerable formal discipline.
The entire film hinges on the decision to let the duvet tutorial play straight while the emotional architecture collapses around it—that tonal restraint, that single choice to trust the viewer to feel the loneliness without underlining it, transforms what could be precious into something genuinely aching.