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2018 · 10m · España
Directed by Jorge Nebra
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A man abandoned by everyone and by personal memory receives daily calls from a young man of unknown identity. The intimate drama turns on Alzheimer's disease, dementia and oblivion.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the disease narrative to wallow in decline—Nebra refuses it, spinning something genuinely unsettling out of a stranger's voice on the phone, which is actually more destabilizing than any montage of forgetting could be.
The film's restraint in staging this intimacy—two voices, a relationship built purely through sound and the absence of visual confirmation—locates itself in a rigorous minimalist tradition, though it risks the very invisibility that defines its formal choice.
The entire emotional architecture hinges on Nebra's decision to keep the caller anonymous and the visual frame intimate but austere; that refusal to resolve or explain the relationship transforms what could've been sentimental into something genuinely tender and strange.