Guerrera
2025 · 3m · Colombia
Directed by Eberto manotas, Mauro Andrade
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Xena faces the loss of her grandmother, who died of cancer; sunk in grief, she finds a video her grandmother left her before dying, in which the old woman speaks serenely of how her suffering has ended and urges her granddaughter to keep moving forward.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects grief cinema to feel like a punch in the stomach—Guerrera does the opposite, and that restraint is almost radical; a three-minute film that trusts a video message to carry emotional weight without scoring it to oblivion feels genuinely contrarian in 2025.
The formal choice to stage most of the emotional arc through a pre-recorded monologue—a grandmother addressing absence rather than presence—recalls a lineage of epistolary and deathbed cinema, executed with measured restraint and formal clarity.
The decision to let the grandmother's voice guide the whole film rather than cutting between reaction shots creates an intimate asymmetry that transforms what could be manipulative into something genuinely tender; it's the restraint that makes it work.