Mi hermano
2015 · 23m · España
Directed by Miguel Lafuente
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A family tragedy forces Alberto to return to his oppressive home town in Spain from Berlin, where he has a free live concert as a comics illustrator.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be a quiet family reckoning, but it's too dutiful about it—there's no perverse angle, no subversion lurking underneath. It's respectable in a way that makes me suspicious it has nothing to say that hasn't been said a hundred times before.
Lafuente constructs a careful geometry of displacement and return, positioning the Berlin life as visual and spiritual counterweight to the oppressive hometown; the film's control of tone and pacing suggests a director thinking seriously about how melancholy accumulates across a frame.
The decision to make Alberto a comics illustrator—rather than a musician or writer—quietly reshapes how we read the visual language of the film itself, collapsing the boundary between character practice and cinematic form in a way that justifies the 23-minute commitment.