calle san benet, 24
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by J.A Valdivia, Eloy Otín
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Among walls that still whisper traditional songs, the film interweaves memories of two lives now absent with the stillness of the present — an intimate journey through the house that was refuge, witness, and inheritance of love, where the past hasn't gone, only changed shape.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
This is formally composed enough that it almost disappears into itself—which is precisely the problem. The essay-film apparatus (layered memory, architectural stillness, inherited absence) feels ancestral rather than subversive, and I'm not convinced the co-directorial voice is doing anything the form hasn't already done.
Valdivia and Otín understand that a house is a text, and they read it with the precision of filmmakers aware of the essay-film lineage stretching back through Akerman and Marker—the interweaving of absence and material space, the way editing becomes a form of archaeological tenderness, situates this firmly in a tradition of rigorous, formally self-conscious work.
The choice to let the architecture breathe as witness rather than backdrop—to trust negative space and the weight of what's *not* shown—is what carries three minutes; most emerging filmmakers would fill that silence, but here the restraint is structural, and it's the single decision that makes this feel inevitable rather than precious.