Pide ayuda
2021 · 3m · México
Directed by Andrés Feddersen, Loretto Bernal
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
A family gives testimony about a suicide-related event that shook them, showing how suicide can be prevented when it is talked about and help is sought, and how, with professional and family support, everyone can recover their smile.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a PSA about suicide to be maudlin and didactic—and this is exactly that, which is why I'm passing. The premise does the heavy lifting; the film just sits there and lets testimony do the work.
There's a lineage of intimate documentary testimony here—the patient accumulation of voices, the formal restraint—that speaks to a curatorial tradition of letting subjects breathe. The three-minute constraint shows discipline, even if the emotional arc feels somewhat predetermined.
The decision to let the family's faces and their pauses carry the weight instead of overlaying score or graphics is what makes this work; there's a specificity in how they frame vulnerability that transforms what could've been a generic PSA into something that actually breathes.