Manual de Convivencia de Genias Creativas
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Leonor Ferrández Alberola
Genres: coming-of-age, essay film, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, whimsical
Two girls reject the tyranny of 'normal', building a home of morning tea, daily birthdays and conversations with objects — a manifesto for inventing your own rules instead of asking for freedom.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A manifesto disguised as a bedroom scene—rejecting 'normal' by just... living differently, talking to objects, celebrating birthdays daily. It's genuinely weird without trying to perform weirdness, which is either brilliant or insufferable depending on your tolerance for sincere whimsy.
Ferrández Alberola positions this squarely in the lineage of essayistic coming-of-age cinema (Varda's *Vagabond* energy), but the film's conversational tone with inanimate objects and its refusal of narrative resolution feel more like contemporary video essay than classical essay-film tradition.
The decision to make the 'manifesto' felt through intimate domestic rituals—tea, birthdays, objects as interlocutors—rather than declaration is what sells this; that tonal restraint, letting the girls' choices breathe without narrating their rebellion, is what elevates 3 minutes into something that sticks.