Guillermo en el tejado
2018 · 16m · España
Directed by Miguel Lafuente
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, tender
Guillermo, a young gay filmmaker trying to fix his love life by putting it on screen, discovers another reality through Samir, a Syrian refugee who makes his own problems look superficial.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup screams self-absorbed millennial navel-gazing—filmmaker obsessed with his own romantic crisis—except Lafuente pivots hard and lets Samir's presence demolish that entire frame, which is genuinely subversive in how quietly it works.
A measured character study that understands the tradition of the coming-of-age film while gently interrogating its myopia; the formal restraint here—what's chosen and what's withheld—situates itself in a lineage of humane European cinema.
The film lives in the moment Guillermo stops performing his own story and actually *listens*, and it's that structural choice—handing narrative authority to the person society has deemed peripheral—that transforms what could've been introspection into something far more honest.