37 años y 364 días
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Pablo Escobedo, Pablo Paracuellos
Tones: absurdist, contemplative
On a sticky Madrid summer day, a municipal gardener works his last shift after nearly forty years on the job — cutting, watering, gathering cones — until, amid the usual bureaucratic precision, something changes. Or perhaps repeats.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A three-minute bureaucratic elegy that refuses the sentimental retirement narrative — instead it loops back on itself, suggesting that ending and beginning are the same gesture, which is either profound or a joke, and I'm not sure the Pablos care which.
The formal precision here is everything: the ritual of the gardener's tasks becomes a measured study in how institutions absorb individual time, and the film's structural return asks quietly what it means to complete something that was never meant to be finished.
The decision to keep the camera at gardener's-eye level — low, among the plants and debris — transforms what could be maudlin into something tactile and true; you feel the weight of forty years in the posture, not the dialogue.