El pastor: una Historia de la Primera Navidad
2019 · 21m · España
Directed by Dallas Jenkins
Genres: drama, family, historical
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A vision of the birth of Jesus Christ through the eyes of local shepherds — simple, hard-working men. In particular, a young, very devout crippled shepherd receives a visit that shocked the world and began to change it forever.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Jenkins does the unthinkable here—makes reverence feel *dangerous* by centering a disabled shepherd as the conduit for the sacred, which should be mawkish but somehow refuses to be; it's faith cinema that doesn't genuflect to its own mythology.
A formally restrained nativity that locates itself deliberately in the long line of religious painting and mystery play tradition, using negative space and the dignity of labor to achieve what overwrought pageantry cannot—a genuinely contemplative rendering of the miraculous.
The entire film pivots on the choice to shoot the shepherds' faces in sustained, almost documentary stillness before the revelation—that restraint, that refusal to cut away or amplify, makes the mythic moment land with devastating specificity.