Amélia & Duarte
2015 · 8m · España
Directed by Alice Guimarães, Mónica Santos
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Amelia and Duarte, two people who have fallen out of love, try to deal with the feelings that surface once their relationship has ended.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two directors, one breakup, zero plot—so it's either a brave formal experiment or exactly the kind of tasteful melancholia festivals overdose on, and I'm betting on the latter.
Guimarães and Santos work within the established grammar of post-relationship cinema with evident precision; the restraint here feels earned, a careful study in how bodies and spaces register emotional absence.
There's a single decision—probably in how they frame the two of them in the same room, or the sound design that marks their distance—that either makes this ache or makes it wan, and I need to see which.