Yamal
2023 · 19m · España
Directed by Miguel A. Almanza
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A young migrant manages to reach the Andalusian coast. However, what seemed to be the end will only be the starting point of a new odyssey, in which his dreams and certainties will once again be in danger.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the arrival at the coast to be catharsis—Almanza makes it a false summit, which is genuinely bold, but the film then settles into exactly the melancholic-immigrant-drama template it seemed to interrogate, and that's where it loses me.
Almanza positions *Yamal* within the lineage of European art cinema's migration narratives—Kostantin, the Dardenne brothers—but executes with a formal restraint that feels distinctly contemporary: the refusal of easy emotional resolution mirrors a visual grammar of suspended moments that recalls the best festival work of the past five years.
The structural pivot—treating arrival not as ending but aperture—is clever, but what actually makes this work is Almanza's decision to shoot the second half in a wider aspect ratio, a single formal choice that converts the landscape from backdrop into witness, and suddenly the whole film breathes differently.