No quiero volver solito
2010 · 17m · Brasil
Directed by Daniel Ribeiro
Genres: coming-of-age, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Leonardo, a blind teenager, falls in love with Gabriel, the new boy at school, and must deal with the jealousy of his best friend Giovana.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a sensitive coming-of-age romance and miss the point—Ribeiro's real move is letting jealousy and desire exist without moral resolution, which means the film trusts its audience to sit in actual discomfort instead of catharsis.
A film acutely aware of its debt to the European coming-of-age tradition while resituating that grammar through a Brazilian queer lens; the editing's restraint and Ribeiro's compositional choices suggest a director already fluent in the language he's speaking.
The specificity lives in how Ribeiro photographs Leonardo's blindness not as metaphor but as literal sensory grammar—the camera becomes his touch, his listening, his way of moving through space—and that single formal choice makes the romance feel earned rather than imposed.