Alimezher
2020 · 12m · España
Directed by Liteo Pedregal
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Alberto, exhausted from caring for his father with Alzheimer's while his parents resist hiring help, decides to give up. The film rearranges time like its anagram title, asking viewers to rebuild the story's logic.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A film that literally scrambles its own narrative and asks you to piece it back together—most scouts would call that gimmicky, but Pedregal uses temporal disassembly to crack open something true about memory and collapse that a linear story never could. The anagram isn't clever for its own sake; it's the form confessing what the content is too exhausted to say.
Pedregal's structural experiment sits in conversation with Marker and Haneke's formal investigations into time and witnessing, and the discipline required to sustain a fractured narrative without descending into mere puzzle-making reveals a director in dialogue with the experimental tradition. The melancholic restraint in the performances anchors what could've been an aesthetic exercise into something genuinely moving.
The decision to weaponize non-linearity against the viewer's instinct to comprehend—forcing you to rebuild Alberto's exhaustion rather than simply observe it—is the hinge the entire film turns on, and it's a choice made with such clarity that it transcends formal play and becomes the emotional content itself.