Up and running (2026) by Lorena Ros
ES | 2025 | 71 min | Documentary
➡️ Where to Watch: FestivalScope Pro — Industry Professionals | Festival Circuit
Starting Again Means Little Without the Stability to Make It Possible
After serving a ten-year prison sentence, 48-year-old Noa wants something seemingly straightforward: to rebuild her life and regain custody of her children. But rebuilding requires a home, and Noa is simultaneously facing eviction. The conditions for her second chance are therefore tied directly to the material instability threatening to take it away.
Lorena Ros turns this contradiction into the foundation of Corren las liebres. Noa's story is personal, but the pressures surrounding her—housing insecurity, limited resources, institutional requirements and unstable living conditions—connect her experience to a much wider Living Crisis.
Yet the documentary does not reduce her life to hardship. Friendship, solidarity, art and humor repeatedly create alternative forms of support when conventional stability remains difficult to achieve.
INCARCERATION → RELEASE → PRECARITY → REBUILDING → SOLIDARITY → STABILITY → SECOND CHANCE
➡️ Trend Insight: Corren las liebres exposes the contradiction inside contemporary second-chance narratives: society can tell people to rebuild their lives while making the basic conditions required to rebuild increasingly difficult to secure.
Why This Movie Matters Right Now: A Second Chance Has Material Requirements
Popular culture often treats starting again as an individual decision. Change your behavior. Work harder. Leave the past behind. Build something new.
Corren las liebres reveals what this narrative leaves out. Reinvention requires infrastructure. Noa needs housing to move closer to recovering custody of her children, but lack of resources leaves her facing eviction. Housing therefore becomes much more than shelter: it affects family, security, institutional recognition and the possibility of moving forward.
That creates the film's central tension:
WANTING TO START AGAIN ↔ NOT HAVING THE CONDITIONS TO START AGAIN
And its central paradox:
YOU NEED STABILITY TO REBUILD YOUR LIFE ↔ YOU NEED A REBUILT LIFE TO ACHIEVE STABILITY
➡️ Movie Insight: The documentary shifts the second-chance story away from individual determination toward the material conditions that determine whether determination can actually produce change.
Should You Watch It?: An Intimate Documentary About Survival Beyond the Statistics
Watch Corren las liebres if you are interested in intimate social documentaries where large structural problems are experienced through everyday life rather than explained primarily through statistics or experts.
Noa's situation touches incarceration, housing, motherhood, economic insecurity, social exclusion and identity, but the documentary also makes room for friendship, humor, creativity and personality. The result is not simply a portrait of hardship but of people continuing to construct meaningful lives inside unstable circumstances.
➡️ Viewing Recommendation: Best for audiences drawn to social documentaries, contemporary Spanish cinema, stories about economic precarity and films examining what rebuilding actually requires after someone has already decided to start again.
Why Everyone Is Talking About It: Audience Recognition Is Turning a Personal Story Into a Wider Conversation
Corren las liebres had its world premiere at DocsBarcelona in 2026, where it won both the Moritz Audience Award and the 3Cat Award. It subsequently appeared in the Documentary Competition at Queer Lisboa 2026, extending its visibility through the international festival circuit.
The audience recognition matters because the documentary's circumstances are specific while its underlying insecurity is widely recognizable. Noa's situation is unusually difficult, but the underlying question—how can someone build stability when housing and economic security remain uncertain?—extends far beyond one life.
PERSONAL STORY → STRUCTURAL PROBLEM → AUDIENCE RECOGNITION → SOCIAL CONVERSATION
➡️ Viral Potential: The film's strongest conversation driver is its contradiction between responsibility and possibility. Noa is expected to demonstrate stability while living within conditions that continuously destabilize her.
Why Corren las liebres Stands Out: Resilience Becomes Collective Rather Than Individual
Stories about adversity frequently celebrate individual resilience: one person faces extraordinary circumstances, refuses to surrender and eventually overcomes them.
Corren las liebres complicates that formula. Noa's determination matters, but so do the people around her. Her cousin Marikarmen and friends including Luana and Nani form part of a community in which solidarity, friendship, creativity and humor help make survival possible.
The film therefore moves from the familiar formula of:
HARDSHIP → INDIVIDUAL STRENGTH → OVERCOMING
toward:
HARDSHIP → COMMUNITY → MUTUAL SUPPORT → RESILIENCE → POSSIBILITY
➡️ Cinema Insight: Corren las liebres rejects the fantasy that resilience is entirely self-generated. Sometimes the ability to keep going exists because other people help carry what one person cannot carry alone.
Movie Trend: Second-Chance: Rebuilding Life After Exclusion — Starting Over Is a Material Process
EXCLUSION → RELEASE → INSTABILITY → REBUILDING → SUPPORT → SECURITY → SECOND CHANCE
Second-chance stories traditionally begin when punishment or crisis ends. The character has served the sentence, survived the breakdown or escaped the past. The future can supposedly begin.
Corren las liebres asks what happens when exclusion continues through different mechanisms. Prison may be behind Noa, but housing insecurity, economic precarity and institutional conditions continue shaping what she can realistically do next.
The second chance therefore stops being a single moment and becomes a process.
SECOND CHANCE ≠ RELEASE
SECOND CHANCE = HOUSING + SECURITY + SUPPORT + OPPORTUNITY + BELONGING
This is what makes the documentary particularly relevant. Reintegration cannot be measured simply by whether someone wants to rebuild. It also depends on whether society provides enough room for rebuilding to succeed.
➡️ Movie Trend Insight: Second-chance cinema is becoming more structural. Instead of asking only “Will this person change?”, these stories increasingly ask “Will the conditions around them allow that change to become sustainable?”
Broad Trend: The Living Crisis — When Basic Stability Becomes the Biggest Barrier to Moving Forward
RISING PRESSURE → HOUSING INSECURITY → FINANCIAL PRECARITY → LIFE INSTABILITY → LIMITED CHOICES → SURVIVAL MODE
The Living Crisis is not simply about having less money. It describes what happens when the basic infrastructure of everyday life—housing, financial security, family stability and access to opportunity—becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
Corren las liebres gives that trend an unusually direct narrative form. Noa needs a home to improve her chances of recovering custody of her children, yet she is at risk of losing the home she currently occupies. Housing insecurity therefore triggers consequences far beyond housing itself.
NO HOME → NO STABILITY → FAMILY REUNIFICATION BECOMES HARDER → SECOND CHANCE BECOMES HARDER
The film shows how precarity compounds. One unstable part of life destabilizes another, making it increasingly difficult to reach the level of security institutions expect.
➡️ Broad Trend Insight: The Living Crisis is ultimately a stability crisis. When maintaining a home becomes uncertain, housing stops being one problem among many and becomes the foundation influencing family, work, identity, security and future opportunity.
Why The Living Crisis Is Growing: Survival Is Consuming the Resources Needed for Progress
The traditional promise of economic participation assumes that effort creates progress. Work, save, secure housing, establish stability and gradually improve your circumstances.
The Living Crisis disrupts that progression:
EFFORT → BASIC COSTS → INSTABILITY → MORE EFFORT → SURVIVAL → LIMITED PROGRESS
For people already rebuilding after exclusion, the consequences can be even more severe. Time, money and emotional energy that could support reintegration instead have to be directed toward maintaining basic stability.
Corren las liebres makes this visible through Noa's housing situation. She is not simply trying to create a better future; she is simultaneously trying to prevent her present circumstances from collapsing.
➡️ Audience Motivation: SECURITY + FAIRNESS + FAMILY + BELONGING + SECOND CHANCES. The documentary connects because it asks a fundamental question: how can people build better lives when so much energy is required simply to maintain the conditions necessary to live?
Viewer Profile: Socially Engaged Adults Interested in Inequality, Survival and Second Chances
Corren las liebres is most likely to reach Millennial socially conscious viewers, documentary audiences interested in contemporary inequality, and festival-cinema audiences looking for intimate stories that reveal larger structural problems through individual experience.
Audience Dimension | Profile |
Core Audience | Social-documentary, independent-cinema and contemporary inequality audiences interested in housing, family, reintegration and economic precarity |
Age / Generation | Millennials, 30–45 — adults experiencing or closely observing changing expectations around housing security, financial stability and conventional adulthood |
Lifestyle | Urban, culturally engaged and socially conscious — documentary viewers, festival audiences, arts participants and people interested in contemporary social change |
Cinema Taste | Observational documentaries, European social cinema, intimate character studies and films connecting personal lives with structural pressures |
Story Motivation | Understanding how someone rebuilds after exclusion when housing and financial instability continue restricting available choices |
Discovery Mindset | Drawn to underrepresented perspectives and films that make large social issues understandable through individual experience |
Emotional Driver | Empathy, fairness, belonging, security and belief in the possibility of another chance |
Key Profiles
Profile | Short Description |
Millennial Living-Crisis Observers | Adults increasingly aware that housing, financial security and conventional stability are becoming harder to achieve or maintain |
Social Documentary Seekers | Viewers interested in inequality, housing insecurity, incarceration, family systems and lives rarely centered in mainstream cinema |
Festival Cinema Explorers | Culturally engaged audiences seeking intimate international documentaries, emerging filmmakers and socially relevant discoveries |
➡️ Audience Insight: The strongest audience connection comes from recognizing that Noa's circumstances are highly specific while the underlying fear is increasingly universal: what happens when the life you are trying to build requires forms of stability that are becoming harder to obtain?
What This Movie Means for the Industry: Social Documentary Is Moving From Issues to Interconnected Systems
Corren las liebres demonstrates why contemporary social documentaries can become more powerful when they move beyond single-issue framing. Housing cannot be separated from custody. Economic insecurity cannot be separated from reintegration. Social exclusion cannot be separated from access to stability.
The documentary therefore reveals a network:
HOUSING ↔ FAMILY ↔ MONEY ↔ INSTITUTIONS ↔ COMMUNITY ↔ FUTURE
This systems perspective allows documentary cinema to show how social problems accumulate inside individual lives without turning those lives into abstract case studies.
Its festival trajectory also demonstrates the continuing importance of documentary festivals as discovery infrastructure. The DocsBarcelona world premiere and awards created early audience recognition, while Queer Lisboa extended the film into another international context.
➡️ Industry Insight: The strongest social documentaries increasingly show how problems connect rather than isolating them into categories. One person's housing crisis can simultaneously become a family crisis, economic crisis, institutional crisis and identity crisis.
Creative Analysis: Intimacy Makes Structural Precarity Visible
Storytelling: One Woman's Second Chance Reveals an Entire System
The documentary begins with a clear personal objective: Noa wants her children back. That gives a complex network of social issues an immediately understandable emotional center.
Housing, incarceration and institutional requirements therefore matter because they affect something tangible. The audience understands the system through what it prevents Noa from achieving.
PERSONAL GOAL → MATERIAL BARRIER → STRUCTURAL PRESSURE → EMOTIONAL CONSEQUENCE
Direction: Lorena Ros Keeps the Person Larger Than the Issue
Ros comes from documentary photography and journalism, with work focused on memory, identity, trauma and power. DocsBarcelona describes her filmmaking as grounded in long-term research and close collaboration with the people she films.
That approach matters here because Noa could easily become a collection of social categories. Instead, friendship, humor, art and everyday interaction expand the portrait beyond hardship.
Performances and Presence: Personality Resists Victimhood
Because Corren las liebres is documentary rather than fiction, its power comes from presence rather than conventional performance.
Noa, Marikarmen, Luana and Nani occupy the film as people rather than symbols. Humor and creativity become especially important because they prevent economic hardship from becoming the only language through which their lives are understood.
Visual Style: Barcelona's Margins Become Part of the Story
Barcelona provides an important contradiction. Internationally, the city is associated with tourism, culture and desirable urban living; within Noa's experience, it becomes a landscape where maintaining secure housing is itself a struggle.
The city therefore contains two realities simultaneously:
DESIRABLE CITY ↔ PRECARIOUS LIFE
That tension gives the Living Crisis a physical environment rather than leaving it as an abstract economic concept.
Themes: Housing, Family, Exclusion and Collective Survival
Housing is the film's structural theme, but family provides its emotional purpose. Reintegration creates its forward movement, while friendship provides the support system surrounding it.
These themes continuously interact:
HOME → STABILITY → FAMILY → BELONGING → FUTURE
Remove the first element and reaching the others becomes more difficult.
What Makes It Different: Humor Exists Alongside Hardship
A documentary about incarceration, eviction, custody and social exclusion could easily become relentlessly bleak. Corren las liebres makes space for humor, friendship and art instead.
That choice changes the meaning of resilience. Noa and the women around her are not interesting simply because they endure hardship; they continue creating identity, relationships and moments of pleasure despite it.
➡️ Creative Insight: Corren las liebres makes the Living Crisis visible without allowing crisis to become the total identity of the people experiencing it. Precarity shapes their circumstances, but it does not fully define their lives.
If You Liked Corren las liebres: Movies About Precarity, Family and Rebuilding Stability
HOMELESS (2026) by Valerio Zanoli: When Finding a Home Means Finding a Way Back Into Society
Following people experiencing homelessness, the documentary explores the circumstances that pushed them into housing insecurity alongside their attempts to recover stability, dignity and a place they can call home.
➡️ Why It Connects: Like Corren las liebres, the film treats housing as much more than physical shelter. A secure home becomes the foundation from which employment, relationships, belonging and a more stable future can begin to be rebuilt.
HOUSING LOSS → INSTABILITY → EXCLUSION → SUPPORT → HOME → STABILITY
Come See Me in the Good Light (2025) by Ryan White: Crisis Cannot Erase Connection, Humor or the Desire to Live
Poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley confront a terminal diagnosis while continuing to find love, humor, creativity and meaning inside circumstances they cannot control.
➡️ Why It Connects: The circumstances are very different, but both documentaries resist allowing crisis to become someone's complete identity. Corren las liebres uses friendship, solidarity, art and humor against economic precarity; Come See Me in the Good Light similarly shows connection and creativity operating alongside profound instability.
CRISIS → UNCERTAINTY → CONNECTION → HUMOR → RESILIENCE → MEANING
Daughters (2024) by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton: Incarceration Reshapes the Entire Family
Four girls prepare for a father-daughter dance with their incarcerated fathers, revealing how imprisonment extends beyond the person serving the sentence and reshapes parenthood, childhood and family connection.
➡️ Why It Connects: Corren las liebres begins after incarceration while Daughters looks at families living through it, but both expose the same larger reality: a prison sentence is never experienced by one person alone. Parenthood and family reunification become central parts of what rebuilding means.
INCARCERATION → SEPARATION → FAMILY IMPACT → CONNECTION → RECOGNITION → REBUILDING
➡️ If You Liked Insight: These documentaries reveal different dimensions of the same structural reality: crisis rarely stays confined to one part of life. HOUSING → FAMILY → SECURITY → CONNECTION → BELONGING → POSSIBILITY. Whether the pressure comes from homelessness, illness or incarceration, stability becomes something people rebuild through both material security and relationships.
Final Verdict: A Second Chance Is Only Real When Someone Has the Conditions to Use It
Corren las liebres begins with Noa's desire to rebuild but gradually reveals why desire alone cannot guarantee reintegration. A home, financial security, institutional recognition, family connection and community support all influence whether a second chance can become sustainable.
Its most important achievement is refusing to turn Noa into either a victim or a simplistic resilience symbol. She exists within severe structural constraints while friendship, humor, creativity and determination continue creating possibilities inside them.
➡️ Final Verdict Insight: Corren las liebres turns the second-chance narrative into a Living Crisis story: starting again is not simply about finding the strength to rebuild—it is about having access to the foundations on which another life can actually be built.
Quick Facts: When Rebuilding Life Depends on Rebuilding Stability
Title | Corren las liebres |
International Title | Up and Running |
Year | 2025 |
Director | Lorena Ros |
Writers | Lorena Ros, Roger Menduiña |
Country | ES |
Languages | Spanish / Catalan |
Runtime | 71 min |
Genre | Documentary |
Production | Novena Nube, Testamento, Twelve Oaks Pictures |
World Premiere | DocsBarcelona 2026 |
Recognition | Moritz Audience Award + 3Cat Award, DocsBarcelona 2026 |
Festival Circuit | DocsBarcelona 2026; Queer Lisboa 2026 Documentary Competition |
Movie Trend | Second-Chance: Rebuilding Life After Exclusion |
Broad Trend | The Living Crisis |
Core Formula | INCARCERATION → RELEASE → PRECARITY → REBUILDING → SOLIDARITY → STABILITY → SECOND CHANCE |
Final Insights: The Living Crisis Is Becoming a Crisis of Second Chances
Corren las liebres reveals one of the less visible consequences of the Living Crisis: instability does not affect everyone from the same starting point. For someone rebuilding after incarceration and trying to reunite a family, housing insecurity is not simply another financial pressure. It can determine whether progress is institutionally recognized and whether rebuilding becomes possible at all.
This makes the documentary part of a broader shift in social storytelling away from celebrating resilience in isolation. Determination matters, but determination operates inside economic and social conditions. The future of second-chance narratives may therefore depend increasingly on examining not simply whether people are willing to change, but whether the world around them provides enough stability for that change to survive.
➡️ Final Insight: EXCLUSION → SECOND CHANCE → LIVING CRISIS → INSTABILITY → COMMUNITY → REBUILDING. Corren las liebres exposes the contradiction at the heart of contemporary reintegration: we ask people to rebuild their lives while the foundations required to build them—housing, security and stability—are becoming increasingly fragile.
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