Enamorados hasta la médula. Pablo Ráez
2018 · 26m · España
Directed by Álvaro Rubio, Javier González, Virginia Areños
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Pablo Ráez sent a farewell message to his friend Pepe on 24 February 2017 and died the next day. The documentary pays tribute to him and to the people who surrounded him during his illness.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straightforward elegy when it could've been a provocation—the filmmakers play it safe with reverence, and I wanted them to break the form, to make us *uncomfortable* with grief instead of just letting us sit in it.
A formally attentive portrait that trusts in restraint and cumulative detail; the way Rubio, González, and Areños layer testimony and intimate footage builds a meditation on mortality that knows its debts to the essay film tradition without aping it.
The decision to let Pepe's final message anchor the whole thing—unadorned, undramatized—does the heavy lifting; everything else orbits that still center, and it's the kind of structural clarity that makes 26 minutes feel inevitable.