Santi
2022 · 11m
Directed by Harry Richards
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
The lone Colombian at a London party navigates microaggressions and self-consciousness while searching for a quiet corner to take his mother's call.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing the 'Brown Kid At White Party' thing now, and Richards just... lets it breathe without irony or sermon, which somehow makes it weirder and more subversive than the contrarian take would've been.
There's a lineage here — the social realist tradition of observing small humiliations with formal precision — and Richards executes it with a quietness that recalls late Koreeda, letting composition and duration do the emotional work.
The decision to keep the mother's voice muffled and distant on that call, audible only as concern rather than words, collapses the entire geography of belonging into one sound design choice—that's the film.
Reviews
Santi explores the loneliness and anxiety of not belonging culturally, and through everyday moments that most people are likely to face. Santi, and everyone else like him, may not belong here but he belongs somewhere.