Salomón
2007 · 19m · España
Directed by Ignacio Lasierra
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Eusebio is an old man who lives in a small village to which a group of sub-Saharans who work in fruit picking has recently arrived; Bassir, the youngest of the immigrants, comes every afternoon to the village park to distract himself while he observes how Eusebio plays pétanque, but Eusebio is already tired of enduring the presence of Bassir in 'his village'.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone wants to make the immigrant-meets-local reconciliation film; Lasierra just... doesn't reconcile them, and somehow that refusal is more honest than a dozen redemption arcs.
A modest work in the lineage of European social realism—Kiarostami's patient observation style, but Lasierra trusts the pétanque game itself as moral argument, which is formally elegant if not revelatory.
The whole film lives in the decision to keep the camera at pétanque-player distance: close enough to see Bassir watching, far enough that we're always reading loneliness through gesture and the clink of metal balls, never through dialogue that would break the spell.