HONGOS
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by MARTA MÁÑEZ MORENO
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Two children face, once again, unforeseen events that mark their young lives; used to uncertainty but not immune to fear, they relive the sense of the unknown they already endured with the pandemic and the Valencia DANA as a new event erupts in Spain — and perhaps in the entire world.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent trauma-processing cinema, sure, but it plays the accumulated-crisis premise straight—layering pandemic + DANA + unnamed catastrophe without asking what's actually subversive about watching kids absorb disaster on repeat. I wanted the film to fracture or interrogate the numbness; instead it just sits in it.
Máñez Moreno's restraint is formally assured—the melancholy accumulates through what's *not* shown rather than spectacle—and there's a lineage here (coming-of-age-under-siege, the Spanish regional specificity) that speaks to contemporary European youth cinema with real seriousness.
The decision to keep the final crisis vague—to let the children's recognition of *pattern* matter more than the event itself—is what makes this work: a single structural choice that transforms it from tragedy-stacking into something about how young people metabolize uncertainty, and it costs nothing but clarity.