La presa
2008 · 16m · España
Directed by Jorge Rivero
Genres: biography, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, tender
In 1946, a 22-year-old Joaquín Vaquero Turcios arrived at the colossal Salto de Salime reservoir works in a remote Asturian region to paint the mural of the turbine hall, an experience that changed him forever and marked his personal and artistic trajectory.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 16-minute essay on a forgotten muralist in a dam is exactly the kind of archive-dust premise that sounds like homework until you realize Rivero's built something genuinely strange and alive out of it—but it still feels too reverential, too much in love with its own material to really surprise.
Rivero situates Vaquero Turtics within a lineage of Spanish modernism interrupted by history, using the reservoir as both literal monument and metaphor; the film's formal restraint—its willingness to let paint, water, and time do the argument—marks it as work deeply conversant with essay cinema tradition.
The decision to intercut the 1946 mural commission with present-day footage of the same turbine hall, letting the architectural space become the film's actual subject rather than backdrop, transforms what could've been biographical hagiography into something about erasure and geological time.