Cada vez que me acuerdo, me olvido
2011 · 14m · España , Reino Unido , Uruguay
Directed by Laura González
Genres: drama, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
María is a Spanish old woman who suffers from Alzheimer's and is constantly assaulted by the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War during her childhood; Rosa is a young Colombian who has lived the war in her own country; when Rosa begins to take care of doña María, it is the beginning of a very special relationship.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This is exactly the kind of film that gets filed under 'worthy' by people afraid of it—two women, trauma, intergenerational healing, all very tasteful—but González refuses the emotional catharsis you're waiting for, letting Alzheimer's and historical violence sit together without reconciling them, which is genuinely perverse in the best way.
A formally precise meditation on how memory and forgetting become indistinguishable in the presence of shared loss; González positions the film in direct conversation with both the Spanish cinema of historical reckoning and the global vocabulary of care work, and the restraint in not resolving their collision is the whole point.
The film hinges on a single recurring visual choice—the way González frames María and Rosa in the same compositional space without cutting between them, making their silences accumulate rather than alternate—and that decision transforms what could've been a therapeutic narrative into something about the weight of just being present.