Omeleto | UNO | Omeleto @Omeleto | Uploaded February 2024 | Updated October 2024, 1 day ago.
A fisherman finds a phone in the ocean.
UNO is used with permission from Javier Marco. Learn more at imdb.com/name/nm2467575.
Emilio is a fisherman working out on the water when he comes across a cell phone in a plastic bag. For the most part, it's not that out of the ordinary... until the phone begins ringing. Emilio answers it, and the fisherman suddenly finds himself playing a small but vital role in a much different, more tragic story.
Directed by Javier Marco and written by Belen Sanchez-Arevalo, this powerful short drama derives its resonance from a small, seemingly simple set-up, compressing setting and time in a way that only the short film format can do. Yet with patient storytelling and excellent craftsmanship, it explores this set-up with extraordinary depth, evoking a larger, more devastating world and story outside the narrative's initial confines.
The film opens with Emilio on the water in his boat, the unvarnished, naturalistic cinematography visually emphasizing the openness of the sea and the boat's isolation within this vast waterscape. This intimidating isolation haunts the story as it unfurls, once Emilio answers the phone he discovers ringing in a plastic bag. On the other line is a woman from another country speaking a language that he doesn't understand at first, wondering what happened to the phone's owner, a man named Mourad.
Emilio doesn't know, of course, but he is too decent to hang up on a woman desperate for any tidbit of information on what happened to Mourad. What he discovers is a much larger geopolitical crisis, one that is made visceral and intimate to him by the woman on the other line. Emilio's position mirrors the viewers, who may have read headlines and news stories of those crossing dangerous seas in dangerous situations for a better life -- and now find themselves confronted with the subject with an immediacy that makes it all too human and palpable.
Emilio chooses compassion in helping the family on the other line to understand what happened, as tragic as it is. As Emilio, actor Pedro Casablanc offers a believably weathered, unsentimental performance as a working fisherman, gruffly going about his life and minding his own business. But when the phone rings, he is made aware of the dizzying number of other realities, and sufferings, that exist outside his own existence.
The phone becomes a tether and connection across the distance, not just between him and the family, but between the abstraction of a news story and the living, breathing and feeling reality, with a family with hopes, dreams and yearnings like any other. Emilio can't do much, but what he does is profoundly moving, compassionate and decent, as limited in its relief as it is, and his act brings a devastating emotional resonance to the conclusion of UNO. As a nearly helpless bystander in the tumult and vastness of the world, with all its uncertainties and travails, it's about all he can do.
A fisherman finds a phone in the ocean.
UNO is used with permission from Javier Marco. Learn more at imdb.com/name/nm2467575.
Emilio is a fisherman working out on the water when he comes across a cell phone in a plastic bag. For the most part, it's not that out of the ordinary... until the phone begins ringing. Emilio answers it, and the fisherman suddenly finds himself playing a small but vital role in a much different, more tragic story.
Directed by Javier Marco and written by Belen Sanchez-Arevalo, this powerful short drama derives its resonance from a small, seemingly simple set-up, compressing setting and time in a way that only the short film format can do. Yet with patient storytelling and excellent craftsmanship, it explores this set-up with extraordinary depth, evoking a larger, more devastating world and story outside the narrative's initial confines.
The film opens with Emilio on the water in his boat, the unvarnished, naturalistic cinematography visually emphasizing the openness of the sea and the boat's isolation within this vast waterscape. This intimidating isolation haunts the story as it unfurls, once Emilio answers the phone he discovers ringing in a plastic bag. On the other line is a woman from another country speaking a language that he doesn't understand at first, wondering what happened to the phone's owner, a man named Mourad.
Emilio doesn't know, of course, but he is too decent to hang up on a woman desperate for any tidbit of information on what happened to Mourad. What he discovers is a much larger geopolitical crisis, one that is made visceral and intimate to him by the woman on the other line. Emilio's position mirrors the viewers, who may have read headlines and news stories of those crossing dangerous seas in dangerous situations for a better life -- and now find themselves confronted with the subject with an immediacy that makes it all too human and palpable.
Emilio chooses compassion in helping the family on the other line to understand what happened, as tragic as it is. As Emilio, actor Pedro Casablanc offers a believably weathered, unsentimental performance as a working fisherman, gruffly going about his life and minding his own business. But when the phone rings, he is made aware of the dizzying number of other realities, and sufferings, that exist outside his own existence.
The phone becomes a tether and connection across the distance, not just between him and the family, but between the abstraction of a news story and the living, breathing and feeling reality, with a family with hopes, dreams and yearnings like any other. Emilio can't do much, but what he does is profoundly moving, compassionate and decent, as limited in its relief as it is, and his act brings a devastating emotional resonance to the conclusion of UNO. As a nearly helpless bystander in the tumult and vastness of the world, with all its uncertainties and travails, it's about all he can do.
