Just Like Arcadia
2015 · 8m · Spain
Directed by Jordi Estrada
Genres: drama, essay film, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
A melancholy, dreamy voyage back to cruel adolescence: a filmmaker mythologizes youth and a lost pseudo-romance with an eighteen-year-old boy through Greek myth and bucolic imagery.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The essay-film-as-mourning thing feels safe now, almost expected—but Estrada's refusal to let the myth do the heavy lifting, instead holding the image and the loss in the same frame without resolution, that's where the subversion hides.
A formally precise meditation on how cinema mythologizes the past; the layering of Greek narrative with intimate memory, the restraint in the editing, places this squarely in the lineage of Marker and Tarkovksy—a film that knows exactly what tradition it's in conversation with.
The singular move here is the sound design's tonal drift—how it separates from the bucolic image just enough to make the viewer feel the gap between what's being shown and what's being mourned, a choice that costs nothing but changes everything.