Flores de mármol y Caballos morados
2022 · 23m · España
Directed by Xoán Bregua
Genres: drama, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Isidoro, a dying old man, tells his granddaughter a tragic story about his youth; during the first moments of the Spanish Civil War, in a Castilian village, Isidoro is witness to how his father mistreats his horse.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise sounds like prestige-drama boilerplate—old man, Civil War flashback, generational trauma—until you realize the entire emotional weight hinges on a horse and its mistreatment, which is genuinely perverse in the best way; Bregua refuses to make the war the story, and that refusal is what makes it work.
A formally assured 23-minute meditation on cruelty and witness that knows exactly where it sits in the Spanish cinema lineage—the framing of personal violence against the backdrop of historical upheaval recalls Erice and Víctor Erice's generation, executed with the kind of measured editing and tonal control that separates craft from mere sentiment.
The decision to let the horse's suffering—not the war, not the family drama—become the moral center of the story is a bold structural choice that reframes the entire grandfather-granddaughter conversation; that single narrative pivot elevates what could've been a conventional period piece into something that lingers because we're watching someone reckon with complicity through a single, unbearable memory.