Salvador (Historia de un milagro cotidiano)
2007 · 11m · España
Directed by Abdelatif Hwidar
Tones: contemplative, tender
On a commuter train, everyone is absorbed and unrelated to anyone else, reading, listening to music or using pocket technology — until a child begins to play hide-and-seek with his father.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the commuter train to stay atomized—it's the whole point of modern transit alienation—so a kid playing hide-and-seek actually breaks that contract in a way that feels earned rather than sentimental, which is rarer than it sounds.
Hwidar constructs a deliberate spatial and temporal argument about collective attention, positioning the child's play as formal interruption; the film's restraint and editing discipline situate it squarely in a European tradition of observational cinema that values what's *not* explained.
The decision to keep the camera static while the play unfolds—letting the geometry of the train car and the passengers' shifting focus do the emotional work instead of cutting to reactions—is the hinge that transforms a simple premise into something genuinely moving.