Brétema
2021 · 17m · España
Directed by Gema Miguez Rodríguez
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
After endless dirt roads, mists and hills live the heirs of David Thoreau's philosophy. Three generations who felt the call to the wild walk in measured step in the same direction: reconnection with nature.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The Thoreau angle feels like it's been mined to death, and three generations walking in sync down misty hills is exactly the kind of reverent nature-doc sanctimony that puts me to sleep—unless there's something genuinely perverse hiding in the measured pacing that subverts the whole pilgrimage mythology, which I doubt.
Rodríguez's formal restraint—the deliberate rhythm of footsteps, the compositional patience with landscape and genealogy—situates this firmly in the essay-film tradition of slow cinema and philosophical documentary; the real work is in how generations are collapsed into a single walking line, a visual argument about inheritance and return.
The decision to synchronize three generations' movement into one measured procession is economical and precise—it does the thematic work without narration, letting the formal choice itself carry the weight of what 'reconnection' actually means across a family timeline.