Mi otro zapato
2017 · 11m · España
Directed by Daniel Zapata
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Why are there so many forgotten, abandoned, unpaired shoes? This is the story behind one ownerless shoe — not of the shoe itself, but of the stories behind it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A meditation on discarded shoes could've been precious navel-gazing, but Zapata's refusal to sentimentalize the object itself—treating it as a vessel for *other* stories rather than its own—is genuinely perverse in the best way.
The essay film as formal inquiry: Zapata positions the abandoned shoe within a lineage of philosophical documentary (Kiarostami, Akerman) while maintaining rigor about what the form can and cannot claim to know about absence.
The decision to keep the shoe itself peripheral—making the *stories around it* the true subject—is what transforms a conceptual premise into something that lands; it's a single formal choice that justifies the entire 11 minutes.