El reloj
2011 · 32m · España
Directed by Joaquín Luna
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In the 1980s, teenager David falls in love with Mariam, his best friend's sister, until she leaves to study in Australia promising to return soon, and twenty-three years later they meet again at a funeral.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a love story that refuses the reunion fantasy—23 years later and they're meeting at a *funeral*, not on a beach at sunset. Luna's doing something genuinely subversive with the romance genre here by letting time do the real work, not the plot.
A formally precise meditation on desire and duration, positioned squarely in the lineage of Rohmer and Kiarostami—the kind of film that trusts a 32-minute runtime to collapse decades into a single, devastating encounter, all clean compositions and measured pacing.
The single stroke that makes this work is the funeral setting itself—it's the one production choice that reframes everything: two people who loved each other meeting not in isolation but surrounded by collective grief, which transforms the entire emotional register of their reunion.