Sirenas
2018 · 6m · España
Directed by David Méndez
Genres: coming-of-age, LGBTQ+, romance
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
Someone else's slip, a plaster and the lights of an ambulance: Nora has her first crush on a girl on the stairs of her grandparents' house. A crazy plan will make them meet again.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a queer coming-of-age romance, which sounds like consensus catnip, but Méndez refuses the obvious emotional beats—that slip, that plaster, the ambulance lights are absurdist scaffolding for genuine longing, not plot furniture. The 'crazy plan' undercuts sentimentality with something closer to magical realism, which keeps it from feeling like every other tender LGBTQ+ short.
There's a disciplined formalism here—the stairs as both literal and psychological threshold, the mundane objects (plaster, ambulance) elevated through composition and sound design into something approaching the poetic. Méndez situates this in a lineage of European coming-of-age cinema that trusts restraint and visual economy over declaration.
The choice to make the meet-cute contingent on accident and improvised response—Nora engineering a second encounter through a 'crazy plan' rather than seizing the moment directly—is what makes this work; it's a single tonal decision that reframes the whole short from wish-fulfillment into something about the real awkwardness and agency of desire, and it costs nothing but clarity of intention.