Uno más, uno menos
2002 · 21m · España
Directed by Álvaro Pastor, Antonio Naharro
Tones: darkly comic, tender
A journalist who wants to literally add humanity to her CV takes on a report about Down syndrome, helped by an 18-year-old girl who has the condition.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup—a cynical journalist mining disability for career capital—could be unbearably preachy in other hands, but Pastor and Naharro actually *commit* to the discomfort, letting the girl's agency dismantle the premise before it calcifies into inspiration porn; it's subversive precisely because it doesn't announce itself as such.
This sits in a carefully calibrated lineage of European humanist cinema, where formal restraint and tonal balance become moral positions; the film's refusal to sentimentalize or condemn, achieved through precise editing and a measured performance, marks it as work aware of its own tradition and accountable to it.
The film pivots entirely on one decision—letting the 18-year-old drive the narrative rhythm and emotional truth rather than her disability—and from that single choice, made visible through casting and cutting, everything else clicks into place with the economy of real craft.