La guerra
2005 · 10m · España
Directed by Jorge Dorado, Luiso Berdejo
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
In the Second World War, a boy with his newborn sister in his arms escapes from a soldier pursuing them and takes refuge in the wardrobe of an abandoned house, but their pursuer is close.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
War thriller premise, except the war is basically window dressing for a claustrophobic hide-and-seek game that could happen anywhere—and that's precisely why it works; the subversion isn't in the twist, it's in stripping WWII down to pure survival mechanics.
Two Spanish directors working in disciplined miniature, drawing a clear line from Hitchcock's suspense grammar through European art cinema; the wardrobe becomes a formal container that forces compositional rigor and turns a 10-minute film into something architecturally complete.
The entire film lives or dies on the decision to keep the baby silent—one performance choice (or non-performance) that transforms a chase into psychological warfare, where the real tension isn't the soldier but the physics of keeping an infant still in the dark.