Marc Rocha is something of a veteran now, a Catalan filmmaker with an eye for beauty and a particular fondness for the natural world. This shines through in his latest film Little Indi, which tells the story of Arnau (played by the superb Marc Soto), an insular seventeen year old living on the outskirts of Barcelona. His family life has been disrupted by an absentee father and his mother getting sent to prison; upon seeing a news report featuring a particularly successful lawyer, he dreams of raising the money needed to hire him to set his mother free. However, with himself and an elder brother and sister all working low-income jobs, it doesn't look like a realistic possibility. So he retreats into nature, finding comfort and solace in his songbirds, of which a prize-winning goldfinch is his pride and joy. Whilst off on one of his frequent walks, he discovers an injured fox, and decides to take it home with him, and nurse it back to health.
That's not just a brief synopsis; it pretty much summarises the film in its entirety. Little Indi moves along at its own leisurely, meditative pace. In no way concerned with packing too much plot or action in, it features longing shots of scenic locales and a wonderful score - filled with birdsong - which combine to lend the film a wonderful transcendental beauty.
What's really of interest, though, is the ending, and the absolute lack of narrative resolution it offers. Cinematic convention dictates that the central conflicts outlined by any film should in some way be addressed, with either a positive or negative outcome, from which the characters can learn the lessons they are supposed to. Little Indi refuses to play along; whilst the first part of the denouement carries a certain sense of inevitability about it, Arnau's reaction to it certainly doesn't, and initially leaves the viewer wondering what exactly they are supposed to take from it. It feels like an unsentimental and even nihilistic rejection of the supposed simpler life that the narrative has depicted up until that point, a bold and unexpected move considering that Rocha presents the city as an intrusive element throughout, something that constantly creeps into the background of shots in a deliberate attempt to highlight the schism between the city and the country; it's a successful device, one which becomes harder to pin down in light of the ending. Thought-provoking in the best kind of way.
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