Pomoc
2003 · 19m · España
Directed by Abraham Hernández
Genres: adventure, coming-of-age, family
Nerea is a girl who tells many lies and no one believes her, not even her father, who threatens to punish her locked in her room; angry, she leaves home to be alone, and when her ball ends up in the neighbours' garden, entering someone else's property to recover it becomes the start of a real adventure.
Picked by Zoe
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A premise about a chronic liar finally being believed sounds like saccharine kid's fare, but Hernández refuses that easy resolution—the adventure stays grounded, the father stays angry, and the ball in the neighbor's garden feels less like plot convenience and more like genuine trespassing into adulthood.
Hernández situates this squarely in the European coming-of-age tradition (echoes of early Vigo, the moral weight of transgression), but the film's restraint—its refusal to sentimentalize either the girl or her dishonesty—marks a deliberate formal choice about how much grace a child protagonist deserves.
The entire film hinges on a single decision: to show us the neighbor's garden not as magical threshold but as *actual other people's space*, which reframes the whole adventure from escapist fantasy into something that costs Nerea something real—that one commitment to consequence over whimsy is what makes this work.