La huella
2023 · 5m · España
Directed by Gaetano del Borreeio
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A young woman passionate about sport enjoys running in a park, where she challenges her limits and feels free exploring trails surrounded by nature. But sometimes fate is unfair.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every sports-redemption-through-nature short ever made, and then it pivots into something genuinely uncomfortable—the kind of tonal whiplash that makes you rewind to see what you missed. Del Borreeio doesn't telegraph the gut-punch, which is exactly why it lands.
There's a considered restraint here that speaks to tradition—the long take in nature, the runner as solitary figure—but the film seems more interested in disrupting that lineage than honoring it, which leaves it caught between modes rather than mastering either.
The shift from kinetic joy to stillness is executed through a single choice of sound design and framing that recontextualizes everything before it; on a five-minute budget, that economy of gesture is what makes this work, and it's almost invisible until you realize you can't unsee it.