Mariana Rekka

How heavy is a dream – and what price do we pay for grasping it too firmly? Fulgores (Shimmer) distills this question through a stark image: a father, Ricardo; his children, Lucía and Matías; and the towering lighthouse standing between them on a desolate plain. Ricardo is certain the structure will rescue his family, while Lucía sees only the emotional walls it’s building around his heart. What begins as a story of survival gradually becomes a portrait of a parent so consumed by the idea of saving his children that he can no longer truly see them.

“The story took a different turn when my own father began to fade into dementia”

In just 19-minutes, director Andrés Palma illustrates that neglect seldom unfolds dramatically. It accumulates like sand – grain by grain – until it forms a divide neither party can overcome. Ricardo works endlessly, convinced that his labor is an expression of love. Meanwhile, Lucía and Mati hover nearby, close enough to be seen yet distant enough to feel abandoned by him. Their small, improvisational attempts at hope move in the opposite direction of their father’s monolith. They lack his certainty, but they hold something he’s forgotten: each other.

Yet the film never paints Ricardo as a villain. It recognizes the fear beneath his obsession – the terror of failing as a father, the instinct to retreat into work when connection feels impossible. “The story took a different turn when my own father began to fade into dementia,” Palma explains. Lucía becomes the emotional counterweight, a quiet echo of that experience. Her longing mirrors his grief; her distance mirrors his regret.

“The animation style in Shimmer aimed for natural movement with stylized exaggeration, avoiding both full realism and excessive toon qualities” – director Palma discussing the aesthetic.

The animation reinforces this emotional gulf with elegant clarity: Ricardo’s hard, angular motion; Lucía’s soft, searching arcs and Mati’s buoyant innocence. And around them, glowing fish swirl like constellations – silent witnesses to a family drifting out of orbit.

What makes Shimmer resonate is its simple, devastating truth: ruin doesn’t arrive suddenly. It grows in the spaces where love should be spoken but isn’t. By the time Ricardo realizes what he’s lost, the lighthouse stands finished – and his children stand elsewhere.

Palma’s film becomes a quiet confession about parenthood: that the dreams we build for our children can eclipse the children themselves and that presence often matters more than salvation. In trying too hard to protect those we love, we can lose them without noticing.

The real cost, Shimmer reminds us, is never the dream. It is who slips away while we’re chasing it.