Jackie Kane
2019 · 17m · España
Directed by José Luis Velázquez
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Santi is a university professor who in the near future is forced to give his classes from home, since everything has shifted towards home consumption: shopping, friends on social networks, sex, education… There is a kind of technological agoraphobia, everything within a click's reach. But there is still a place where everything is as before, and when his class ends, Santi heads there.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's doing the isolation-tech-dystopia thing now, but Velázquez refuses the easy nihilism—the fact that Santi still goes *somewhere* at the end flips the whole sermon into something weirder and more human than the setup promises, which is genuinely subversive.
A formally precise meditation on presence and absence that recalls the slow-cinema tradition of Haneke and Koreeda; the restraint in framing and pacing—the way Velázquez lets the classroom and the undisclosed "place" speak through spatial contrast rather than exposition—marks this as work aware of its own lineage.
The decision to never quite show us where Santi goes, to let that final destination remain tactile and off-screen while everything else is mediated through screens, is the film's anchor—it's a single structural choice that transforms a thesis about technology into something intimate and mysterious.