In memoriam
2012 · 12m · España
Directed by Carmen Bellas
Genres: drama, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Apathetic Iván searches for the studios of scientist Johannes K. Sørensen, and his journey to Antwerp intertwines with the absences in his own memory.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise sounds like a detective story until you realize it's not—memory becomes the actual mystery, the search becomes the point, and everyone else would've turned this into a puzzle box. Bellas trusts the audience to sit with the drift instead of solving it, which is either brilliantly subversive or self-indulgent, and I'm genuinely unsure which.
A 12-minute essay film that inherits the weight of experimental cinema—the formal restraint, the interrogation of form itself as subject—while locating something intimate and elegiac in the architecture of forgetting and travel. This is how a short knows its own tradition and speaks from within it.
The decision to anchor the metaphysical search through the texture of physical displacement—the journey to Antwerp becomes the real film—suggests a filmmaker who understands that absence can carry more presence than plot, and that's done with remarkable economy.