No me despertéis
2018 · 21m · España
Directed by Sara Fantova
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Bilbao, 2009: Jone, a secondary-school teenager in an institute steeped in a pro-independence atmosphere, sees her life change when her father takes a political post in the Basque Government and must live with a bodyguard.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A coming-of-age film about a teenager whose dad joins the government sounds like the most predictable setup imaginable—except Fantova's using Basque political tension as actual texture, not backdrop, which is refreshingly perverse for the genre.
Fantova demonstrates remarkable formal control in how she frames intimacy against ideology: the bodyguard becomes a compositional motif that reshapes every domestic scene, and the film's restraint—its refusal to sentimentalize—places it squarely in the lineage of rigorous European coming-of-age cinema.
The decision to keep the father mostly offscreen, letting his absence physically structure Jone's world through the bodyguard's presence instead, does the heavy lifting that could've taken three scenes of exposition dialogue.