Un cuento familiar
2018 · 13m · España
Directed by José Corral
Genres: comedy, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
While a mother prepares dinner, little Ruben narrates the adventures of Galactic Ray, a brave space hero facing Doctor Evil. Across the night, each family member takes up the tale, revealing desires and shortcomings through the adventure.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
On paper it's a family-friendly story-within-story thing, but Corral's real move is letting each narrator accidentally demolish the heroic myth—the space adventure becomes a mirror for mundane failure, which is genuinely unsettling under all that whimsy.
The nested-narrative structure recalls a lineage from Scheherazade through postmodern metafiction, and Corral executes it with formal precision: each voice-over shift is architecturally deliberate, a meditation on how we construct meaning through retelling.
The decision to let Ruben's invented hero stay completely static while the family's retellings erode and complicate the myth—that's the hinge; it's a small film doing something sophisticated about how we project ourselves onto stories, made singular by refusing to sentimentalize it.