Perrito chino
2012 · 15m · España
Directed by Fran Gil-Ortega
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Rosa, a fifty-five-year-old single woman, and Sabina, a twenty-five-year-old Cuban, are neighbours sharing a city rooftop terrace, two uprooted women who have not yet met despite everything they have in common.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two women, uprooted, unmet, sharing a rooftop—it's almost too quiet, too patient for its own good, and that's exactly why it shouldn't work but somehow does; Gil-Ortega refuses the obvious collision and sits instead in the space between them, which is either profound restraint or the most boring thing I'll see all week.
A precise study in spatial and temporal ellipsis—two lives held in suspension on a shared threshold, rooted in the neorealist tradition of intimate social portraiture but filtered through a contemporary, almost photographic stillness; the formal restraint mirrors the emotional architecture of displacement itself.
The real move here is the rooftop as a liminal space that *refuses* to become symbolic—it's just where these two happen to exist, and that specificity, that refusal of metaphor masquerading as depth, is what makes the tender moments land without feeling earned.