El limpiaparabrisas
2021 · 15m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Alberto Mielgo
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative
In a café after lunch, a middle-aged man smoking his way through a pack of cigarettes asks what love is, and a collection of vignettes and situations leads him toward the answer he seeks.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A guy chain-smoking through existential dread while vignettes float past like fever dreams—it's the kind of formal experiment that could've been pretentious garbage, but Mielgo actually *commits* to the absurdist structure instead of winking at it, which is rare enough to make it interesting.
Mielgo's construction here—the way he frames the café as a liminal space where philosophy and mundane cigarette smoke become indistinguishable—sits squarely in a lineage of European essayistic cinema, with the control and deliberation you find in measured formal work that trusts its own architecture.
The decision to let the vignettes interrupt rather than illustrate the question about love—letting form and content genuinely collide instead of neatly align—is what makes this work on a shoestring; that structural choice does all the heavy lifting.