Formol
2010 · 15m · España
Directed by Noelia Rodríguez Deza
Genres: drama, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In an apparently deserted abandoned village, past, present and future blur, and the traces of hundreds of lives remain preserved in the formaldehyde of time.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The formaldehyde metaphor is clever enough, but the film doesn't actually *do* anything subversive with it—it's just a pretty, melancholic meditation on decay that every other experimental short has already made, just with better production design.
Rodríguez Deza operates in the lineage of poetic documentary and structuralist cinema, where time-as-preservation becomes the formal argument itself; the editing rhythm and mise-en-scène work in concert to make temporal collapse feel inevitable rather than merely illustrative.
The decision to let the formaldehyde conceit *unfold* through sound design and negative space rather than exposition is what elevates this—that restraint, that refusal to explain the surrealism, is the entire film working on a shoestring.