Jota
2017 · 30m · España
Directed by Manuel Román Sierra
Tones: contemplative, tender
Young executive Locke drives through remote northern mountains toward home, then ends lost with a broken leg in the middle of a forest. Old hunter Jota, living alone in the mountains, rescues Locke into a small isolated cabin, where cultural clash slowly becomes friendship until a dramatic decision forces hard questions.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent mountain-man-meets-city-slicker stuff, the kind of premise that gets greenlit because it's *safe*—two men, one cabin, a lesson learned. I'd rather watch a film that didn't already know its own ending by minute five.
Román Sierra builds something genuinely considered here: the cabin becomes a formal container for watching class and culture negotiate intimacy through small gestures and silences, structured with the patience of a Bresson or late Koreeda—this is cinema aware of its own restraint.
The choice to keep the injury *real* and painful rather than narrative convenience is what makes this breathe—Locke's dependence isn't metaphor but physical fact, which reframes every quiet moment between them as labor, and that ground-level vulnerability is what transforms a familiar setup into something earned.