Llamadme Ismael
2020 · 17m
Directed by J.M. Asensio
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Rafa, who never knew his grandparents, befriends Ismael, an Alzheimer's patient at a day center who turns out to be a world-traveling adventurer.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent intergenerational tearjerker, which means it's doing exactly what a thousand other shorts are doing—mining poignancy from the Alzheimer's-as-plot-device well. Asensio isn't subverting the premise; he's executing it cleanly, and clean isn't interesting.
A formally assured coming-of-age that understands the grammar of tender cinema—the quiet cuts, the measured pacing—and situates itself squarely in the lineage of humanist European short drama. It's precisely made, even if the emotional architecture feels familiar.
The film lives in Ismael's fractured memory sequences, where Asensio uses handheld grain and slight temporal discontinuity to collapse past and present without spelling it out; that single formal choice—letting the editing do the emotional work instead of the script—is what transforms a stock premise into something that actually breathes.