Despertar
2015 · 3m · España
Directed by Icíar Bollaín
Tones: contemplative, tender
A man wakes after several years in a coma and must rediscover a world that has changed in many things, but not in the most important ones, in Campofrío's Christmas campaign film.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a Christmas commercial, which already puts it on thin ice, but Bollaín's refusal to wring sentimentality from the premise—that the world changes except the things that matter—is genuinely strange in a way that almost redeems the Campofrío branding.
Bollaín demonstrates remarkable formal restraint in a three-minute form, letting the gap between technological and emotional time do the heavy lifting; the film understands how to situate itself in the lineage of humanist European cinema without ever announcing that fact.
The real move here is what Bollaín doesn't show us—the choice to let the awakening unfold through quiet domestic recognition rather than montage spectacle creates a tension that costs nothing but makes the whole thing breathe differently than it has any right to in a branded piece.