The word that unites all of Diogo Baldaia’s protagonists is also the best descriptor for his cinema: young. Youth is his abiding subject and in exploring the diverse desires and insecurities, passions and frustrations that distinguish the experience of young people today he has sought out forms of corresponding novelty and vigour.

The opening minutes of Mirage My Bros (2017) encapsulate the existential dialectic that is at the heart of Baldaia’s films. Following a prelude, consisting of two gorgeous low-angle shots of boys lying on a jungle gym and contemplating the azure sky, the first chapter begins with the camera slowly tracking down a school corridor. A cleaning lady walks ahead and a teacher comes rushing in the opposite direction. He pulls a door open and disappears inside. The camera keeps travelling forward while the teacher is heard yelling at the headmaster about receiving a pay cut, about unfair administrative practices, about having sacrificed his life for a corrupt public school system. A girl sneaks along the corridor wall, waiting for the cleaning lady to turn the corner. Two more children emerge from behind a cabinet and the trio run off through the door at the far end of the hallway, just before the irate teacher storms out of the headmaster’s office and back the way he came.

Two images of blissful innocence give way to a reality check with this wonderfully choreographed shot, which juxtaposes the worlds of adults and children, contrasting their chief preoccupations: work vs. play. Even when Baldaia’s characters grow older – to date, they comprise elementary school children, teenagers and early twentysomethings – this division remains. The ‘adults’ in his films, such as the casually racist football scout in the second chapter of Mirage My Bros, the horny director in Destiny Deluxe (2019), or the scientists conducting shady experiments in Sonido: Ivans & Tobis (2023) are either briefly glimpsed or only heard as off-screen voices. In their rare appearances, they recall the humans from the Tom and Jerry cartoons, whose disembodied legs function as an oppressive synecdoche of power and domination.

The one exception is the grandmother in the gleeful and macabre Why Are You Image Plus (2023), Baldaia’s most explicitly satirical work. Here, too, there is an oppressor, namely the saint who prevents a little girl’s ghost from communicating with her surviving grandmother. The girl is shown in home movie-style images as her voice speaks from beyond the grave in a cartoonish voice-over created with text-to-speech AI. Despite her young age, she has no compunction about telling the saint, a stand-in for the Catholic church, to ‘fuck off’ so that she may be reunited with her grandmother. Eventually, love wins the day, as it usually does in Baldaia’s films: the power of friendship offers Sonido’s experimental subject an escape from his tormentors, while the two young women in Destiny Deluxe overcome their respective feelings of alienation, at least for the length of a song and a dance, when their paths cross on a dark lonely night.

Baldaia’s use of an AI-generated voice-over is just one of the more obvious examples of the contemporary quality of his aesthetic, which goes beyond placing conspicuous temporal markers within the diegesis. (In fact, conventional signposts such as smart phones hardly figure, and often they confuse rather than illuminate: when Chloé, the struggling Brazilian artist in Destiny Deluxe, appears to be talking with friends on a video call, we only see her face and can’t hear her interlocutors. Are they typing to her? Is she actually hosting a camgirl session?) Rather, it’s Baldaia’s mise-en-scène that feels particularly modern. Uninhibited by formal restrictions, the fluid editing will freely move from a carefully composed tableau, to a shaky handheld shot, to a moment of charmingly cheap CGI. The quality of the image and colour palette can radically change from one moment to the next, just as characters can suddenly find themselves transported to other places, other dimensions. When a cloud materialises in a classroom in Mirage My Bros, the question it elicits isn’t so much why? as why not?

It’s not that Baldaia’s films are free of influences – the desolate sight of Chloé eating alone in a shopping mall evokes Tsai Ming-liang; Sonido’s mysterious black hole seems borrowed from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century; Bressonian close-ups of hands abound (though, in fairness, it might be time to reclaim Bresson’s monopoly of this image) – but they have been reworked within an aesthetic that eludes easy comparison. He has yet to make the transition to features. In their joyful embrace of the experimental possibilities of short-form filmmaking, especially the freedom to disregard the strictures of narrative, his shorts make it difficult to imagine what shape a Baldaia feature might take. One is apparently in the works, here’s hoping it shows us how to stay forever young.