Ni una sola línea
2017 · 17m · España
Directed by Víctor E.D. Somoza
Genres: adventure, comedy, drama
Tones: provocative, tender, whimsical
Like every afternoon, Encarna and Rosario meet for churros at their neighbourhood café. However, today is a special day: what at first seems a boring snack of two elderly women becomes a fast-paced adventure, and something more — a vindication of the right to choose how they want to live their last days.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two abuelitas eating churros shouldn't be subversive, but Somoza makes it transgressive—flipping the script on how cinema treats the elderly by letting them be agents of their own chaos instead of props in someone else's sentimentality.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of Spanish humanist cinema, though its tonal whimsy risks undermining the political weight of its premise about autonomy and dignity in old age—a formal tension worth interrogating.
The genius is the pacing: Somoza cuts between intimate café moments and kinetic adventure sequences with such precision that the tonal rupture itself becomes the statement—suddenly these women aren't confined to the quiet frame cinema expects them to occupy.