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2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Teresa Ruiz Velasco
Tones: contemplative, tender
Every summer the same question returns: who will look after what matters most while you are on holiday — and sometimes things do not turn out as planned.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A summer-holiday-anxiety premise that's been done to death, except Ruiz Velasco refuses the obvious punchline—the film trusts us to sit in the discomfort of small, real failures instead of mining them for laughs, which is either quietly radical or just patient filmmaking depending on your mood.
Formally restrained and deeply aware of its lineage in European domestic cinema—the kind of short that accumulates meaning through precise framing and temporal economy rather than narrative event, positioning itself squarely in the tradition of Koreeda and Valeska Grisbach.
The entire film pivots on what appears to be a single unguarded moment between caretaker and child—Ruiz Velasco's decision to let that interaction breathe without editorializing transforms a three-minute premise about parental anxiety into something about the strange intimacy of delegated care.