Los vecinos
2015 · 17m · España
Directed by Diego Figueroa
Genres: drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, tense
In Santiago de Chile, in the autumn of 1976 under the military regime, Antonio is a veteran university professor with a quiet life of books, classical music and the plants of his garden, oblivious to everything around him, until the arrival of new and noisy neighbours whose shouting will not let him sleep.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to read this as a tidy allegory about state oppression crushing the individual—but Figueroa's actually interested in something weirder: the way fascism doesn't need grand gestures when it can just make you annoyed by your neighbors' existence.
A formally precise film that understands how restraint *is* the form: the garden, the books, the refusal to show violence—it sits squarely in a lineage of political cinema that trusts visual silence more than rhetoric, and the 1976 Santiago setting gives it both historical weight and formal justification.
The sound design is doing all the work here—those neighbors remain mostly off-screen, their noise the only intrusion—and that single choice of withholding the visual threat while drowning us in sonic violation transforms what could've been obvious into something genuinely unsettling on a modest budget.