La maleta
2025 · 10m · España
Directed by Antonio Nieto
Genres: comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, tender, whimsical
On a business trip to Lisbon, a young businessman loses his patience when his suitcase breaks before reaching the hotel. What seemed a simple setback turns unexpected when he finds another apparently ordinary suitcase — whose interior holds not clothes but voices, characters and emotions, including an old man who murmurs memories and, most valuable of all, the pure emotion of laughter and happiness.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the suitcase to be a portal, a metaphor, a lesson—and Nieto just... gives you one that talks back, full of an old man's rambling and actual laughter, which is the most aggressively simple thing you could do with a premise screaming for magical realism clichés, and somehow it works.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of contemporary European whimsy—think Jeunet's tactile surrealism—but the real craft lives in the restraint: how Nieto lets the suitcase's contents breathe as character rather than spectacle, keeping the emotional register intimate even as logic dissolves.
The singular move here is treating the suitcase's interior as pure sonic landscape rather than visual feast; by letting the businessman discover emotion through voice and memory before ever seeing anything, Nieto makes a 10-minute film on what sounds like a modest budget feel like it's operating at a completely different scale of intimacy.