Footsteps Forward
2025 · 15m
Directed by Michael Rukavina
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, sports
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A talented teenage soccer player loses the father whose obsession with the game shaped his ambitions. Training on without him, he must work out which of his dreams were ever really his own.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent grief-via-sports cinema, the kind of thing that plays well at regionals and then vanishes—Rukavina's doing exactly what the premise asks, which means he's doing nothing to complicate it.
A formally assured coming-of-age that understands the lineage of sports drama and the bildungsroman, executing its melancholy with the kind of restraint that rewards patient viewing and repeat engagement.
The film's entire architecture rests on a single sustained choice: the decision to let the soccer field itself become the space where grief does its work, and the way Rukavina frames training montages—repetitive, almost unbearable—as the only honest language left available to a kid who can't speak.