La vuelta
2025 · 3m · Argentina
Directed by Luna Binder
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Manu returns to her native Buenos Aires feeling lost and confused, unable to stop thinking about what she left behind on her trip to Madrid; the subway tunnels, turned into a labyrinthine portal between countries, lead her to reflect and give her life a new direction.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The subway-as-liminal-space thing is well-trodden territory, and the premise reads like every other 'lost European millennial finds herself through magical realism' draft—Binder needed to commit harder to the surreal weirdness or blow up the coming-of-age arc entirely.
Binder's three-minute structure shows real sensitivity to pacing and the formal constraint of the form; the spatial grammar of the labyrinthine tunnels as metaphor sits squarely in a lineage of European art cinema that understands geography as psychology.
What elevates this is likely a single directorial choice—whether that's the rhythm of the subway cuts, the specific texture Binder chose for the Buenos Aires/Madrid visual transition, or a performance beat from Manu that reframes the whole emotional register in the final thirty seconds.