Yalla
2020 · 10m · España
Directed by Carlo D'Ursi
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, war
Tones: contemplative, tense
Mufid, a 14-year-old boy, plays football with his friends. He misses a shot and makes the ball disappear behind a hill; he does not want to go and fetch it, but he knows he will. When he enters the area, watched by a military drone, he discovers that Amina has taken his ball, and he tries to get it back.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the drone to be the villain here, but D'Ursi refuses that easy read—the real tension lives in the mundane negotiation between two kids, which is way more unsettling than any spectacle could be.
The film positions itself deliberately within the tradition of Palestinian coming-of-age cinema, using the landscape and sound design to echo works like *Elia Suleiman's* formal restraint while maintaining its own observational clarity.
The decision to keep the drone perpetually off-screen—present only as watched, never shown—transforms a 10-minute short about a missing football into something that breathes with real dread; it's economy as strategy, not limitation.