Cuidar
2026 · 19m · España
Directed by Jota Aronak
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Several family caregivers open their homes and recount, intimately and in the first person, a year spent caring for elderly relatives — their emotions, worries and motivations.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's formally restrained to the point of invisibility—which is exactly why it almost works; the refusal to sensationalize caregiver burnout is subversive in a documentary landscape drunk on trauma spectacle, but it never quite finds the formal rupture that would make that restraint *sing*.
Aronak situates this squarely in the essay-film tradition of intimate testimony—Chantal Akerman's durational witness, the Dardennes' close attention to emotional labor—and executes it with the kind of measured framing and sound design that trusts the viewer's intelligence rather than their tear ducts.
The decision to let silence breathe between accounts, to let the camera rest on hands and domestic spaces rather than faces, transforms what could be maudlin into something genuinely unsettling; that restraint is the whole film, and it works because Aronak *commits* to it completely.