A short film born as a creative sketch — and the first of the Almost Red universe to reach Spain’s schools.

Sunset in Paris (Atardecer en París) — the 10-minute LGBTQ+ short film directed by Roberto F. Canuto and Xu Xiaoxi and produced by Almost Red Productions — has been selected by the ICAA (Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales) for Aula Corto, Spain’s official educational short film platform.

Through Aula Corto, Sunset in Paris becomes available not only to schools throughout Spain, but also to Spanish educational centres abroad through the “Acción Educativa de España en el Exterior” programme. The selection significantly expands the film’s audience beyond traditional festival circuits, allowing it to reach students, teachers and educational communities in different countries and cultural contexts.

For us, it opens a chapter we hadn’t imagined when we made this film. Until now, Sunset in Paris had lived almost exclusively in the festival world. Now it’s going into classrooms.

What Is Aula Corto — and Why This Selection Matters

Aula Corto is the educational platform created by Spain’s Ministry of Culture, through the ICAA, in collaboration with Siena Educación. Its premise is simple: the short film as the only protagonist in the classroom. The platform currently offers a catalogue of 66 short films from recent years — across fiction, animation and documentary — available for free to registered teachers at primary, secondary, bachillerato and vocational training levels across Spain and at Spanish schools abroad.

Each film comes with a dedicated teaching guide (guía didáctica) with specific activities designed to help teachers get the most out of the screening — whether for values education, audiovisual literacy, or simply as a starting point for conversation. Teachers register for free using their school email address, and each school can have as many registered users as it has teachers.

It is, in other words, a serious institutional infrastructure for bringing Spanish cinema into education. Being part of that catalogue — alongside films awarded at the Goya Awards and screened at major Spanish festivals — is not a minor thing.

Sunset in Paris (Atardecer en París) was selected directly by the ICAA for the film’s cinematic quality and the educational value of its content. On the platform it is recommended for 4º de ESO, Bachillerato and Vocational Training (FP) levels, and catalogued under three UN Sustainable Development Goals — SDG 3 (Health and Wellbeing), SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) — with competencies in citizenship and personal and social development.

When we read that classification, something clicked. SDG 3 because the film is about emotional health — about what happens inside two young people when they finally allow themselves to feel something they’ve been carrying without a name. SDG 10 because the inequality it addresses isn’t economic: it’s the quieter, more intimate inequality of growing up in a world that hasn’t yet made room for who you are. And SDG 4 — quality education — because that’s exactly what cinema can do when it’s used well: teach empathy, teach ambiguity, teach the courage to sit with a question rather than rush to an answer.

The story Sunset in Paris (Atardecer en París) tells is precisely the kind that often goes untold in a classroom. Which is, perhaps, exactly why it belongs there.

Pelayo Carrizo and Paula Lasheras in Sunset in Paris (Atardecer en París), directed by Roberto F. Canuto and Xu Xiaoxi — selected by the ICAA for Aula Corto

A Short Film Born as a Sketch

Sunset in Paris carries a subtitle that gives away its origins: Sketches of IUS II. It was not conceived as a standalone work. It was conceived as a tool.

During the extended development process of IUS of Time — the 25-minute LGBTQ+ drama that has since gathered more than 60 international festival selections and 7 awards — Roberto F. Canuto and Xu Xiaoxi identified the need to explore the emotional world of Luca, the film’s young protagonist, before the main shoot began. The result was two short films made as preparatory exercises: Blow Down (Sketches of IUS I) and Sunset in Paris (Sketches of IUS II). Both were completed and edited by the end of 2024, alongside IUS of Time itself.

What none of them anticipated was that these sketches would develop a life of their own.

Sunset in Paris premiered at the 62nd FICX – Gijón International Film Festival in November 2024, in the Asturies Curtiumetraxes section — the festival’s dedicated showcase for Asturian short cinema. That premiere placed a film made as a preparatory exercise in front of one of Spain’s most historically significant film festivals.

The Story: A Mountain, a Game, and Something That Needed to Surface

During a quiet afternoon on a mountain in Asturias, two young friends — Luca and Ana — play a game of “Truth or Dare.” The rules are simple. The conversation is not. Slowly, through challenges and confessions, what begins as play becomes something harder to name: a recurring dream that resurfaces, an attraction that refuses to stay buried, a desire that neither character has yet been able to speak aloud. Paris appears in the background — as a possibility, as a threshold, as the place where a different life might begin.

The film doesn’t resolve what it opens. We didn’t want it to.

“The game is part of life, and often, life reveals itself through play. The two teenagers at the heart of this story stand on the threshold of discovery — when everything feels possible, when words flow freely, when play is still, almost exclusively, the essence of existence.” — Roberto F. Canuto & Xu Xiaoxi

Where It Was Made: Monte Cayón and an 18th-Century Attic

The film was shot in a single intensive day in the municipality of Piloña, Asturias. Exterior scenes were filmed on Monte Cayón — a mountain known for its sweeping, hard-to-reach views over the Asturian landscape — where shooting began in the afternoon to capture the warm light of the setting sun. Once darkness fell, the crew moved indoors to the attic of an 18th-century house in Biedes, where the night added a quality of quiet tension to the more intimate sequences.

The small production team deliberately prioritised spontaneity. Improvisation was encouraged in several of the dialogues. The camera began with close-ups — capturing proximity, small gestures, the unspoken — and gradually opened to wider shots as the emotional landscape between the two characters shifted. The Asturian landscape in Sunset in Paris is not backdrop. It is, as in all Almost Red films, an active presence: the mountain as mirror, the attic as confession booth, the darkness as permission.

Night scene from Sunset in Paris (Atardecer en París), filmed in an 18th-century attic in Biedes, Asturias — selected by the ICAA for Aula Corto

The Cast: Two ESAD Graduates, One Shared Universe

Pelayo Carrizo plays Luca — the same character he would go on to play in IUS of Time. Born and raised in Asturias, Pelayo graduated from the Superior School of Dramatic Arts of the Principality of Asturias (ESAD) and has been a regular collaborator with Almost Red Productions since his film debut in 2021. His theatre credits include work with Factoría Norte and Susana Gudín Producciones, and tribute productions for the Fundación Princesa de Asturias. The continuity of his presence across the IUS universe — from sketch to feature short — gives the character a coherence that was not scripted so much as lived.

Paula Lasheras plays Ana. Originally from the province of Burgos, she completed her studies at ESAD Asturias in 2024 — the same year this film was made. A multidisciplinary artist — actor, dancer, figure skater, singer. What Paula brings to Ana is hard to name precisely — which is fitting, because Ana is a character who resists being pinned down. She listens with her whole body. Her vulnerabilities surface without announcement. It was exactly what the scene needed.

Festival Journey: From FICX to an International Queer Circuit

The film’s initial distribution was handled by Nueru Distribución, an Asturian short film distributor, during its first year on the festival circuit. It is currently distributed by Almost Red Distribution. Since its premiere at the 62nd FICX in 2024, Sunset in Paris has built a steady festival presence:

Its selection at Playa del Carmen brought the film its first international screening and its first LGBTQ+ film festival outside Spain. The Aula Corto selection now adds a different kind of reach: not a festival audience of cinephiles, but classrooms across the country.

A Film Within a Universe

Sunset in Paris does not stand alone. It is part of a creative ecosystem that Almost Red Productions has been building across three interconnected short films.

Blow Down (Sketches of IUS I) was the first preparatory exercise — exploring a different dimension of the same emotional territory. Sunset in Paris came second. And IUS of Time is the work they made possible: a 25-minute rural Asturian drama about memory, silence and intergenerational desire that has become one of the most internationally circulated Asturian fiction short films in recent years, with more than 60 international festival selections across Europe, the Americas, Asia and Oceania, and 7 awards — including the Director’s Choice Award at the 45th Thomas Edison Film Festival (USA), Best Cinematography at the 4th Silicon Valley Queer Film Festival (USA), and the Audience Award at the 24th Avilés Acción Film Festival (Spain).

That the sketch has now found its way into Spain’s classrooms, while the film it prepared for continues to travel the world, feels like the natural order of things.

About Almost Red Productions

Almost Red Productions is the company Roberto F. Canuto and Xu Xiaoxi founded to make the films they needed to make. Roberto is from Gijón; Xu is from Chengdu. They met through cinema and have been making films together since 2008 — in Los Angeles, in China, and now in Asturias. Their previous short film Sunken Plum travelled to more than 50 international festivals, including Raindance (London), Seminci (Valladolid), FICX (Gijón), the Málaga Film Festival and Outfest (Los Angeles), and won the Silver Caravel at the Cartagena Film Festival. Sunset in Paris is part of the same universe as IUS of Time — a film that has since become one of the most internationally circulated Asturian fiction short films in recent years.

Official page: Sunset in Paris →

IUS of Time — the film this was a sketch for →

Blow Down — Sketches of IUS I →

About the directors →

Aula Corto educational page →