La otra cena
2013 · 13m · España
Directed by Albert Blanch
Tones: contemplative, dark
It is Christmas Eve and the army roams the streets of a ruined city. Some survivors manage to flee; only an old man insists on staying and returning to his house for dinner.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects war films to scream; Blanch's refusal to sensationalize the old man's stubbornness—just a guy going home for dinner while everything burns—is almost boring enough to be genuinely subversive, which means it's probably working.
There's a lineage here that runs through Bresson and late Tarkovsky—the small domestic act as resistance, the frame as moral argument—and Blanch executes it with such formal restraint that the Christmas dinner becomes an almost liturgical counterpoint to the violence outside.
The decision to keep the camera patient and observational rather than chase the chaos outside is what makes this work; it's a single editorial commitment that transforms a survival narrative into something about the weight of ritual.