Lejos/Cerca
2015 · 9m · España
Directed by Quique Santamaría
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Olivia, a Swedish girl who has moved to Madrid, feels physically and emotionally lost due to language problems and lost roots, and decides to spend a day in the forest to disconnect.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A girl goes to the forest to feel better—it's the kind of premise that sounds like a greeting card until you realize Santamaría is using the woods as a refusal, not a cure, which is genuinely weird and honest in a way most introspection-porn shorts aren't.
The film sits within a recognizable lineage of European art cinema's dialogue with nature and displacement, yet Santamaría's formal restraint—letting silences and negative space do the emotional work—marks a considered, almost austere approach to the bildungsroman moment.
What makes this work is Santamaría's choice to let Olivia's foreignness live in her body rather than her dialogue; the way she moves through the forest—tentative, observant, never settling—is the entire story, and that single commitment to physical storytelling over exposition transforms a simple premise into something genuinely felt.