Erase love
2009 · 12m · España , Estados Unidos , Indonesia
Directed by Javier Ideami
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
In the year 2500, after their mother's sudden death, two sisters challenge each other to discover which of them will be sent to an uncertain destiny by their sick father, in a confrontation between sisterly love and survival instincts that leads to a dramatic end.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2009 sci-fi short that actually *inverts* the emotional core of survival narrative — the father's cruelty masquerading as necessity, the sisters weaponizing love itself — feels like the kind of premise everyone else filed under 'bleak family drama' and missed the subversion entirely.
Ideami stakes this in the lineage of speculative family tragedy going back to Koreeda and early Haneke, using the sci-fi apparatus not as spectacle but as formal constraint that sharpens the moral argument; the 12-minute discipline shows real curatorial restraint.
The real lift here is the sound design's restraint during the confrontation — letting the silence *between* dialogue choices do the sister dynamics' heavy lifting rather than score or exposition, which transforms what could be melodrama into something genuinely intimate.