KO tècnic (KO Técnico)
2023 · 17m · España
Directed by J.Ricard Berenguer
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
A working-class father of the late 1960s lives a somewhat convulsive work and family situation, which he tries to ignore by taking refuge in his great love of boxing — a passion he transmits to his son and that his young wife repudiates.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to see this as a respectful period family drama, which is exactly why it's boring — Berenguer's just restaging the working-class-dad-loves-boxing archetype without interrogating or subverting a single frame of it.
The film's formal restraint—how it lets boxing become both refuge and refusal, how the editing respects the silences between father and son—locates it precisely in a lineage of Dardenne-adjacent social realism, but with a distinctly Spanish working-class specificity that deepens rather than decorates the form.
The choice to shoot the family dinners in tight, airless framing while the boxing scenes breathe with overhead light—that structural reversal, the decision to make domesticity claustrophobic and sport expansive—is what makes this lean 17 minutes feel excavated rather than conventional.