La plegaria
2019 · 10m · España
Directed by Manuel Olmedo Redondo
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In the summer heat, yellow spider mite plagues attack the vineyards of the Manchegan plain, and a young farmer tries to palliate the disaster with the means at his disposal.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A farmer fighting spider mites in La Mancha sounds like it should be agit-prop or magical realism, but Redondo refuses the easy move—he just stays there, in the heat, watching a man exhaust himself against something invisible and indifferent. It's almost boring enough to be radical.
There's a lineage here—the rural dignity films of Bresson, the landscape-as-character tradition—but Redondo earns it through formal patience rather than homage, letting duration and framing do the moral work of bearing witness.
The decision to keep the spider mites unseen, to let the disaster exist only in the farmer's labor and the yellowing leaves, is what makes this work—a single formal constraint that transforms a ten-minute premise into something that *feels* like it's about mortality.