El reloj
2017 · 5m · España
Directed by Borja Santomé
Genres: drama, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A tale about travel and change, about the passage from the coast to the big city: an explorer discovers the unsettling part of the city, walking its streets as an exasperated observer, in a largely autobiographical story.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's autobiographical essay-film about urban alienation—which sounds like every MFA thesis ever made—but Santomé resists the urge to perform his own melancholy, which is genuinely unsettling; the refusal to make the discomfort legible is the only interesting move here.
A precise meditation on transition and dislocation that positions itself thoughtfully within the essay-film tradition—the formal restraint, the elusive narrative architecture, the way it treats the city as both subject and formal problem—argues for something worth defending.
The choice to hold the camera steady while the observer's internal state fractures around him—letting location become emotional weather rather than backdrop—is what makes this 5 minutes feel like genuine spatial and psychological transformation on almost no apparent means.