El sobrino
2009 · 17m · España
Directed by Nacho Blasco
Genres: coming-of-age, crime, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Jacobo is a good boy but unhappy: girls reject him and his godfather is a bastard; his only way to be loved is to become one of 'the bad ones', like his godfather.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise sounds like a hundred other coming-of-age-through-crime shorts, but I'd need to see what Blasco actually does with it—if there's a twist in the DNA, I'm listening; if it's just sad kid + bad influence, pass.
A cleanly structured moral descent that sits comfortably in the Spanish New Wave lineage—formally measured, thematically precise, the kind of short that proves you don't need artifice to examine complicity and inherited damage.
What matters is how Blasco chose to stage the godfather's gravitational pull—whether it's a glance, a silence, or the way a scene is cut—because that single decision either makes this a genuine portrait of seduction or lets it flatten into melodrama.