Llamada perdida
2017 · 1m · España , Serbia
Directed by Ignacio Rodó, Klea Markovic
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Alan and Mirjana, both eighty years old and separated by 5,000 kilometres, are forced to love each other through a computer screen.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a film about separated octogenarians to wallow in melancholy—Rodó and Markovic refuse, and that refusal to perform expected grief is genuinely weird in ways that matter.
The restraint here feels classically Scandinavian in its lineage, a formal study in presence-through-absence that recalls the long takes of Bresson or Tarkovsky, executed with disciplined economy across sixty seconds.
One minute to build an entire geography of longing through a screen—the directors' choice to frame the computer interface itself as the primary landscape, rather than cutting between the two faces, does all the emotional work.