Por un infante difunto
1998 · 9m · España
Directed by Tinieblas González
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Julio, a sad and timid boy, barely survives in a miserable home with alcoholic, embittered parents, until one afternoon his mother sends him to the butcher's to buy food on credit.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's formally patient in a way that feels almost defiant—a 9-minute film about a boy buying meat on credit could collapse into sentiment, but González holds the frame steady and lets the misery breathe without performing it, which is genuinely weird for 1998.
A precise, austere entry in the lineage of European social-realist cinema; the elliptical editing and refusal of narrative climax situate this in conversation with Kiarostami and early Haneke, with a formal restraint that feels earned rather than affected.
The real move here is González's decision to stay on Julio's face in the butcher's shop—no music, no cutting away—letting the accumulated weight of the home life register as pure, unbuffered presence in a stranger's space.