En el olvido
2013 · 9m · España
Directed by Alberto Collado de Lis
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Diego gives his father Antonio a curious book, 'Relatos de un salmantino', during his sixty-eighth birthday dinner in a restaurant. As the conversation progresses it becomes clear that Antonio is that 'salmantino' and that he no longer remembers himself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Okay, so it's a reversal on the birthday gift trope—the son gives the father back his own life, except the father doesn't recognize it—but the execution is too tasteful, too controlled. It doesn't *commit* to the weirdness; it smooths everything into respectful melancholy.
The restrained mise-en-scène and temporal architecture—the book as the hinge that unlocks recognition without resolution—place this securely in the European art-cinema tradition of Haneke or Koreeda, where domestic spaces become interrogation chambers for memory and identity.
That moment when Antonio flips through the pages and the realization doesn't land as epiphany but as slow, fractured comprehension is everything; Collado de Lis trusts the actor's face over any expository dialogue, and that choice transforms a nine-minute short into something that aches.