Sleepless City

Guillermo Galoe's first feature competed in Critics' Week at Cannes in 2025, and grew out of a short, Aunque es de noche, that he shot in the same place — La Cañada Real Galiana, a fifteen-kilometre strip of self-built housing on the outskirts of Madrid where some 7,000 people live, many without mains electricity since 2020.

Antonio Fernández Gabarre plays Toni, fifteen, whose family deals in scrap and whose neighbourhood is being cleared house by house. Bilal Sedraoui plays the friend whose family is going first. Galoe casts from the settlement itself and films at the children's height, mixing documentary observation with a dreamlike register — the greyhound, the horses, the drone shots of demolition — that keeps the film from becoming a report.

What it avoids is the sociology: nobody explains the Cañada to the audience, and the adults' decisions are shown as constrained rather than debated. It sits alongside The Worst Ones in the catalogue as a film about children in a place a state has decided to remove, made with the children who live there.