GALICIA NON ARDE
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Martin Rothardt
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A short film about the wildfires that stalked the skies over Lugo, about guilt, and about a homeland, Galicia, where there is no room left for the pain that a can of gasoline and a lighter can inflict on the land one inhabits.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a grief poem masquerading as fire documentation—which is fine, but the film never quite commits to the weird philosophical move it's circling: that arson *is* a form of speech in a place where speech has failed. Play that tension and you've got something; as is, it's too tasteful for its own good.
Rothardt locates himself in a precise lineage of Iberian landscape elegy and climate testimony, and the editing discipline—holding shots long enough that absence becomes presence—marks a formalist understanding of how montage can hold moral weight without didacticism.
The sound design is doing the real work here: the ambient crackle and sudden silences create a spatial grammar that the visual grammar alone couldn't reach, and that asymmetry—trusting audio to carry what image won't say—is the specific craft choice that makes three minutes feel necessary.