La Mer
2020 · 2m · España
Directed by Víctor Claramunt
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Four children, aged six to eleven, speak from two-tone environments filled with the plastic that surrounds everyday life. They tell adults what is being done to the oceans and the planet.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Kids lecturing adults about ecological collapse while surrounded by garbage should be unbearable—didactic, on-the-nose, exactly what consensus would expect—but Claramunt somehow makes the artifice *work*, turning what could've been a PSA into something genuinely unsettling by refusing to apologize for its directness.
The two-tone staging recalls a lineage of pedagogical cinema and essay film that takes children's witness seriously—from Marker to contemporary eco-documentary—and Claramunt executes this with formal restraint: the plastic environments aren't chaotic but composed, letting the children's words carry the weight without manipulation.
The decision to let the children speak in their own cadence rather than coach them into performance is what lifts this; their small hesitations and genuine confusion become more devastating than any rehearsed gravity could be, and on a two-minute budget that choice is everything.