Lizdas
2012 · 12m · España
Directed by Antonio Savinelli
Genres: drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
During Aliona's childhood, her parents recorded poems and songs she knew by heart on an audio tape, and thirty years later she listens again and returns to the place where she was born.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a memory piece, sure, but Savinelli resists the obvious nostalgia trap—the tape isn't a crutch for sentiment, it's a formal constraint that actually generates something stranger and more honest than the typical homecoming essay.
A precise meditation on how sound archives the self; Savinelli positions the listening act as the film's true subject, situating this within a lineage of essay cinema concerned with time, fidelity, and the gap between the voice we were and the ear we've become.
The decision to let the tape play *over* the return rather than illustrate it creates an almost unbearable tenderness—that one formal choice, that single commitment to non-alignment between sound and image, does all the emotional work a $2M restoration drama would need a crew of fifty to fake.