Opaco
2018 · 18m
Directed by Juany Chica Sáez
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
An autistic boy who is bullied at school begins to change when Ana befriends him, and their friendship becomes a lesson against bullying and exclusion.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like a PSA that wandered into a film festival—sincere anti-bullying beats wrapped in competent indie drama, but where's the premise that makes you uncomfortable, that refuses to let you settle into the feel-good arc? This plays it too safe to provoke.
Sáez demonstrates control in the tender register, and there's a lineage here—the sensitive coming-of-age that values observation over sentiment—but the film sits within rather than interrogates its own tradition, content to be well-made rather than formally distinctive.
The heart of this lives in how Sáez frames the autistic boy's perceptual world through spatial and compositional choices—a specific visual grammar that lets us *see* his difference rather than be told it, a decision that transforms what could've been an after-school-special into something genuinely felt.