Propiedad Privada. Se Vende
2016 · 16m · España
Directed by Carmen Quijada
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Carlos is a ten-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother in a house they can no longer pay for and which belongs to Simón, a lonely man who measures his wealth in zeros in his bank account. Simón wants to shut the house up with a chain and padlock, but first it must be empty, so he spends hours and days watching the grandmother and grandson from the square — until the boy sits down beside him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the lonely rich guy to be the villain here, but Quijada subverts that into something genuinely unsettling—a film about economic violence that refuses to give you a monster to hate, just two people on opposite sides of an eviction notice who somehow see each other.
The formal restraint is striking: a film about dispossession told almost entirely through static shots and the space *between* grandmother, boy, and Simón, positioning itself in a lineage of slow cinema that treats poverty with dignity rather than sentimentality.
The entire film pivots on that single moment when the boy sits down beside Simón—a choice that reframes the whole power dynamic and turns what could've been a social-issue drama into something about human recognition, and it's executed with such economy that you feel it in your chest.