Pequeño desertor

The scouts

Everyone expects war films to lionize resistance or wallow in atrocity—this one just watches a six-year-old try to leave, which is somehow more unsettling than either. The premise wants to provoke, but it doesn't quite earn the permission to ask it.

Mora works in the shadow of postwar German cinema's reckoning with complicity and childhood, yet the film's tonal restraint—dark but tender—suggests he's still searching for the formal language to hold both poles at once.

The entire film pivots on the decision to shoot a child's face in close-up during moments of dawning comprehension rather than action, and that patient refusal to let us look away is what makes the desertion feel real instead of rhetorical.