mala sombra
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by ivo erasmo senecal
Genres: experimental, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Everyone ignores their own shadow, so used to its company — but the shadow itself explains what would happen if it disappeared one day.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A shadow soliloquizing its own obsolescence is exactly the kind of premise that makes you retroactively realize how stupid it is that no one's ever done it—Senecal flips the conceit inside out and refuses to explain the metaphor, which is the only way it could possibly work.
The formal restraint here is admirable: a three-minute philosophical monologue that resists the urge to visualize its own abstraction, sitting instead in the lineage of Cocteau and experimental animation that trusts voice and negative space to carry the weight.
The decision to have the shadow speak in a register of wry acceptance rather than desperation—matter-of-fact about its own death—is what transforms a one-liner concept into something that actually lands; that tonal calibration in what could've been maudlin is everything.