Aniversario
2017 · 15m · España
Directed by M. Bixquert
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Andreu and Emilia, an elderly couple living in an inland town in Castellon, set out on a road trip to the sea. The journey becomes an attempt to erase the memory of a painful anniversary.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the sea to heal them in a film like this, but Bixquert seems genuinely uninterested in redemption—there's a deliberate refusal to earn the catharsis, which is either frustratingly restrained or genuinely bold, and I'm still not sure which.
A quietly rigorous examination of how cinema has always used landscape and time to process grief; the road-trip-to-the-sea carries real weight here because Bixquert knows exactly what she's invoking and chooses restraint over sentiment with visible formal control.
The decision to let the couple move through space in near-silence, punctuated by small, observed moments of physical tenderness, does the entire emotional work—it's economical filmmaking that trusts duration and proximity over explanation.