Scratch
2017 · 20m · España
Directed by David Valero
Tones: dark, melancholic
JM, a young disc jockey with a mild cognitive disability, lives in a marginal world, until one night he witnesses a brutal beating that will change his life.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a turning-point crime drama, but Valero refuses the obvious revenge arc—instead he stays lodged in JM's disorientation, letting the beating stay peripheral to the real subject, which is witnessing itself. It's a film that actively works against what you expect it to be.
There's a deliberate restraint here that recalls the social realist lineage of Ken Loach or the spare emotional syntax of Haneke—Valero trusts the formal distance between JM and the camera to do the moral work, even as the narrative pulls toward melodrama.
The entire film turns on the decision to keep the DJ booth as JM's emotional center rather than abandoning it after the beating; that choice to return him to the turntables, to the small ritual of scratching, is what makes the disability representation feel earned rather than circumstantial.