‘For The Opponents’ Cannes Review: A Stunning Short That Finds an Entire Childhood in a Boxing Ring

I don’t usually include short film reviews in these dispatches — I don’t have access to all of them, and singling out some while ignoring others competing under the same conditions tends to feel unfair. But the Palme d’Or awarded to For the Opponents, the short filmed in Mexico by Argentine director Federico Lucas, gives me reason to make an exception. As does the film itself, which is extraordinary. Simple, powerful, direct, and essential.

Over a brisk fourteen minutes, the director of Simón of the Mountain turns his camera on a boxing match between two children who can’t be older than eight or nine, and stays close — revealingly close. The frame locks onto the face of Damián, one of the two young fighters, and what registers there is a cascade of feeling: competitiveness, the hunger to win, fear, the dawning sense that the fight is slipping away from him, sadness, and finally an expression that leaves him right at the edge of tears — all of this while the people in his corner and in the stands are cheering him on, urging him to keep going.

This arc of feeling gradually defeated in something he has poured his time and training into reads first as disappointment, but when the film opens up to show the people around him, what surfaces is something closer to empathy and a quiet sorrow. His family and trainers are neither cruel nor indifferent — they are simply invested in Damián becoming the great boxer they’ve all dreamed of, a dream he has been made the vessel for. But in scenes with other children his age, it becomes clear that Damián’s place is not in the ring. It’s in a childhood that has more room for play, for freedom, for a life with fewer demands and less violence.

Lucas doesn’t underline any of this. He doesn’t need to. It accumulates through those tight shots of the boy’s face, and through the way Damián seems, constantly, to be holding back the urge to cry — because crying, he must have learned, is not what a boxer does. And yet crying, playing, having fun, being allowed to lose: these should be at the center of his life, not the brutal punishment he’s being put through. That face, over the course of just a few minutes, takes on the weight of a much larger understanding of the world. It is a coming-of-age compressed into a handful of boxing rounds. A single moment that might reshape an entire life.