Hide & Seek
2025 · 2m
Directed by Alejandra Vidal
Genres: coming-of-age, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Shot on 16mm, a short film captures children at play — the thrill of hiding and being found — as a meditation on memory, fleeting moments, and the feeling of wanting to be found.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 16mm meditation on childhood memory and fleeting joy—formally restrained enough that it could bore you, but Vidal's actually resisting the urge to sentimentalize, which is the subversive move here; most filmmakers would've turned this into a grief-parade, and she didn't.
Vidal situates herself in the lineage of structural essay film and observational cinema—the 16mm stock isn't nostalgia, it's a considered formal choice that mirrors the film's investigation of how memory captures and holds moments; the restraint in editing and pacing demonstrates real curatorial intelligence.
The decision to hold on the children's faces in stillness rather than cut to the moment of discovery is what makes this work—it shifts the entire emotional register from narrative catharsis to interior longing, and on a two-minute runtime with likely minimal crew, that one structural choice reframes everything.