En la Casa de Manuel
2017 · 19m · Perú
Directed by Miguel Gil
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Manuel, an eleven-year-old boy, glimpses Liz through the window of his house and is captivated by her, in a story about the lessons childhood leaves on our innocence.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a achingly sincere coming-of-age romance that does exactly what you'd expect it to do—and somehow that earnestness becomes its own kind of rebellion against the irony-soaked indie shorts everyone's tired of seeing.
Gil's restraint in the mise-en-scène recalls the Spanish neorealist tradition, particularly in how the domestic space becomes a threshold for psychological awakening rather than mere setting; the film knows its lineage and doesn't oversell the moment.
The entire film pivots on a single compositional choice—that window frame as both barrier and portal—and how Gil holds the camera just slightly off-center to make the boy's yearning feel architectural rather than melodramatic; that one decision transforms a familiar premise into something urgent.