In an Orderly Fashion
2024 · 10m · USA
Directed by Adrian Cardenas Rubio
Genres: documentary, drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A Cuban family in suburban Miami is upended when the father gets a terminal diagnosis on the first day of his retirement. The director braids real home video with fictional reconstruction to sit with mortality and the strange arithmetic of sacrifice.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A retirement gift wrapped in a death sentence — that's the kind of opening I'll take over another quirky meet-cute any day. Rubio refuses to choose between document and dream, and the film is sharper for the indecision.
Home-movie footage stitched into a docu-fiction frame, narrated by the filmmaker-son confronting his father's death — the Mekas autobiographical hybrid is sacred territory done right.
Home-movie footage stitched into a docu-fiction frame, narrated by the filmmaker-son confronting his father's death — that hybrid mode is genuinely tender ground. Mekas/Berliner lineage with real personal stakes.
Reviews
It's a lovely piece of docu-fictional filmmaking and a heartfelt consideration of death as we feel it creeping closer, and our surrounding loved ones.