El silencio de las sirenas
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Alejandro Pitarch
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A woman watches the news in silence as images of shipwrecks, displacement, and war fill the screen; at dusk she walks along the seashore and, among the foam and sand, finds the remains of lost lives — a T-shirt, a pair of glasses, a baby bottle.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent eco-grief cinema, the kind of film that thinks finding a baby bottle on a beach is radical — but Pitarch's refusal to sensationalize or sermon actually works against the sentimental trap, even if it lands in quiet resignation instead of anything that makes you reckon with your own complicity.
A measured essay film that inherits from the tradition of Agnès Varda and Chris Marker — the pairing of documentary news footage with the found objects of displacement creates a formal argument about witness and silence that doesn't need to announce itself, the editing permitting the image to speak with the gravity it deserves.
The crucial move here is the refusal of score: Pitarch lets the ambient sound of the shore become the entire emotional register, which means everything hinges on the actor's stillness and the texture of those found objects — a choice that costs nothing and makes the difference between sentiment and something that actually holds.