El último destello
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by María Luz Zamora Abanades
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Since passing his exams, Mario has kept a lighthouse while knowing that technological advances would one day replace his work with a machine; in love with the world of maritime lanterns, he has assembled a museum-collection of everything to do with lighthouses.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Mario's lighthouse museum is basically a shrine to obsolescence—which is quietly radical, but the film itself plays it too straight, too precious; it needed to lean harder into the absurdity of preserving the thing that's killing you.
Zamora Abanades situates this elegantly within the cinema of technological melancholy (Koreeda, Reichardt territory), and the three-minute constraint disciplines every frame into something formally austere and genuinely moving.
The decision to let Mario's hands—weathered, repetitive, almost ritualistic—carry the entire emotional weight while the lighthouse beam cycles in the background transforms what could be maudlin into something tactile and true.