¡Aúpa, Delibes!
2015 · 11m · España
Directed by Daniel Rivas
Genres: biography, coming-of-age, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Miguel Delibes's father told the future writer, still a child at his first contact with the bicycle, to always look ahead and never at the wheel, in a short inspired by the 94-kilometre route Delibes rode each summer to see his girlfriend Ángeles de Castro.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A bike ride to see your girlfriend as the crucible of a writer's formation—it's almost too literary, too reverent, which is precisely why it might actually work; Rivas could've made this maudlin, but there's something genuinely perverse about treating a teenage romance like sacred text.
The film's formal restraint—its willingness to let a single pedagogical moment (look ahead, never at the wheel) structure an entire meditation on attention and desire—marks it as work conscious of how cinema inherits from literature; it sits comfortably in the lineage of essay-films about artistic formation.
The choice to literalize Delibes's father's instruction as both practical cycling advice and metaphorical life lesson, then let the 94-kilometre route become the film's actual architecture, is the kind of economical structural decision that transforms a heritage piece into something that moves.