El secreto de Lisi
2009 · 22m · España
Directed by David Arranz
Genres: drama, fantasy, historical
Tones: contemplative, theatrical, whimsical
Writer Francisco de Quevedo returns four hundred years later to his lordship of La Torre de Juan Abad just as the village children begin to forget him; through Lisi, a girl reading a first edition of El Buscón, he makes himself present among them, but must again face the henchmen of the Count-Duke of Olivares.
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A ghost story about a 17th-century poet haunting a Spanish village could've been treacly, but Arranz commits to the weird baroque theatricality of it—treating Quevedo's return not as sentimentality but as a genuine incursion of the past into the present, henchmen and all.
Arranz situates this squarely in a lineage of literary ghosts and Spanish historical cinema, but what elevates it is the formal precision: the way the first edition of El Buscón becomes the membrane between centuries, and how the editing respects both the whimsy and the genuine melancholy of forgetting.
The entire film pivots on casting a child actor (Lisi) who can hold the weight of being a conduit between worlds without winking at the camera—that single performance choice transforms what could be a gimmick into something genuinely eerie and alive.