El nudista
2015 · 18m · España Colección: En blanco y negro
Directed by Alex Waudby
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Raúl stares absorbed at a naked couple on the beach. Only ten years old and stripped of all prejudice, he understands the symbiosis between the human body and nature. The taboo that nudity represents becomes a burden for Raúl, who must shed the sordid vision inculcated in him to reach his goal: to be a nudist.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A coming-of-age about body acceptance sounds like festival-circuit milk until you realize Waudby's actually staging a kid's gaze as pure, uncontaminated perception—then spending the whole film watching society poison that innocence. It's tender where it could've been preachy, which is almost suspicious.
Waudby positions this within a lineage of European body-positive cinema and coming-of-age formalism, using Raúl's optical innocence as both narrative engine and philosophical anchor—the restraint in cutting and sound design serves the film's commitment to observation over judgment.
The entire film hinges on one choice: keeping the camera at Raúl's eye level, so nudity registers as landscape rather than transgression, and that single formal decision transmutes a potentially didactic premise into something genuinely felt and visually singular.