Las reglas del juego
2014 · 9m · España
Directed by Juan Antonio Moreno, Rodríguez Suárez
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Spain, 1938: in the middle of the civil war, José and Antonio, two soldiers of opposite sides, establish their own rules in order to look for a possible pause in the contention with the objective of seeing each other, chatting and, while they are at it, catching up with each other.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects Spanish Civil War cinema to be about heroics or trauma, so watching two soldiers from opposite trenches negotiate a ceasefire just to *talk* feels almost perverse—and that's exactly why it works, though I'm mildly annoyed Margot will probably pick it first.
The film's restraint and formal precision—how much tenderness it extracts from constraint, how deliberately it positions intimacy within historical violence—locates it in a lineage of humanist cinema that trusts silence over statement, making it the kind of short programmers will return to.
The choice to keep the soldiers' dialogue minimal and let the landscape and glances do the emotional work transforms what could've been melodrama into something that breathes; that single decision to let emptiness speak elevates the whole piece.