El palacio de las pipas
2021 · 12m · España
Directed by Hernán Cabo, Beatriz Velilla
Genres: drama, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A man and a woman meet again at the old Cines Doré in the early 1970s, when the passage of time and the Franco dictatorship had relegated cinema to something decadent. They had not seen each other since their last premiere seven years earlier; she returns to explain to him the reasons for her flight, and he has inherited 'el Salón', which he wanted to turn into a space for public screenings.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a film about Franco-era cinema to genuflect at the altar of lost art—Cabo and Velilla instead refuse easy nostalgia, trapping their characters in a space that's beautiful precisely because it's dying, which is the kind of perverse move that makes consensus film people deeply uncomfortable.
The decision to set a reckoning between two people inside a decaying movie palace—where the architecture itself becomes a text for what cinema meant under dictatorship—shows a formal intelligence about how location functions as argument, positioning this squarely in a lineage of European cinema that uses space as moral language.
The entire film turns on the choice to keep the camera observant rather than intrusive during their reunion: it's a restraint that makes every glance between them register like a cut, trusting that the melancholy of the Doré's faded grandeur will do the emotional work rather than underlining it.