Last of You
2013 · 27m · Israel
Directed by Dan Sachar
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In a devastated world, Yonatan, inventor of a device that replays recorded memories, obsesses over the last recollections of his late wife and refuses to leave them behind when the time comes to move to safety.
Picked by Margot
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It's a grief film dressed in sci-fi drag, which is fine, but the memory device feels like a crutch for what could've been a genuinely unsettling meditation on loss—Sachar plays it too safe, too precious with the premise.
Sachar situates himself squarely in the tradition of memory-as-cinema (Marker, Farocki), and the formal rigor of replaying and re-examining the same footage—editing as an act of devotion and refusal—gives the melancholy real weight and complexity.
The decision to literalize the replay mechanic through physical repetition of scenes rather than montage or dissolve grounds the abstraction of grief in something tactile and exhausting, and that friction between technology and raw emotion is what makes the whole thing work.