Olvidadas Despedidas
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Catriel Molina
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Ramón, a septuagenarian with the beginnings of Alzheimer's, has learned that the football field of his youth, long fallen into disuse, will be demolished to make way for new housing blocks; although he may be forgetting his world, he still keeps a farewell for his best friend — or at least, almost all of it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a competent elegy about memory loss and urban decay, sure, but it's working in exactly the register you'd expect — sad old man, demolition, nostalgia — and I'm not seeing the formal or thematic twist that would make me care beyond the surface sentiment.
Molina locates this film in a precise lineage of Latin American cinema concerned with loss and landscape, and the restraint in how the script withholds the farewell itself—letting Ramón's fragmenting mind become the editing logic—suggests a filmmaker thinking rigorously about form and what silence can hold.
The decision to keep us outside Ramón's memory rather than inside it—watching him reconstruct the goodbye through gesture and environment instead of voiceover or flashback—is the whole film, and it's what makes three minutes feel earned instead of slight.