Donde caen las hojas
2016 · 18m · España
Directed by Alicia Albares
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Eva receives an unexpected call: her mother is on the verge of death. In that cold hospital full of fear and anguish, Eva will face the memories of her past and encounter magical help; with no other way out, she will have to learn to look at death from another perspective.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The magical-realism hospice setup could've been maudlin grief theater, but Albares refuses sentimentality—she lets the surrealism do the heavy lifting without explaining it, which is genuinely rare in death-meditation shorts.
Donde caen las hojas sits confidently in the lineage of Latin American magical realism as formal device, not decoration; the way Albares integrates the fantastical into hospital-ward naturalism shows real dialogue with García Márquez and a control over tone that reads like a filmmaker aware of her tradition.
The film lives or dies on whether that 'magical help' moment lands as genuine transcendence rather than genre window-dressing, and Albares commits fully to it—there's a specific compositional choice in how she frames Eva's shift in perspective that makes you believe the fantasy has earned its place.