La noche de todos los santos
2016 · 15m · España
Directed by Gustavo Vallecas
Genres: drama, fantasy, historical
Seventy-five years after the Civil War, extraordinary events shake Spain on the Night of the Dead, provoking unprecedented historical happenings and the arrival of journalists from all over the world.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A Spanish Civil War ghost story that plays it almost *too* straight — the surrealism is there, sure, but it genuinely seems to believe in its own mythology rather than interrogating it, which is either a missed opportunity or exactly the kind of sincere weirdness consensus taste would dismiss.
Vallecas positions this within a lineage of magical realism that reckons with historical trauma—García Márquez by way of Guillermo del Toro—and the formal restraint (that 15-minute constraint, the mythic rather than explicit approach to Civil War ghosts) shows a curator's understanding of how genre can hold political weight without collapsing into allegory.
The decision to hold the camera steady and let the supernatural intrude into ordinary journalist-interview scenes rather than exploding the frame creates an unsettling friction that costs nothing but changes everything—a small film that understands restraint as a form of intensity.