Por un sueño
2014 · 17m
Directed by Sergio Mediavilla
Tones: contemplative, tender
Roberto, a thirty-something accustomed to another type of trip, starts the Camino de Santiago route as one more adventure; on his journey he finds himself in a village in which it seems that nobody lives, and he crosses with Manuel and María, who welcome him into their house to spend the night, for which he feels indebted to them.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A pilgrim film that plays it devastatingly straight—no twist, no deconstruction, just the Camino as spiritual clarification—which somehow feels like the most subversive move possible in an era of genre-bent everything.
Mediavilla situates this squarely in the lineage of contemporary European contemplative cinema, where narrative restraint and the landscape's formal weight do the emotional labor; the village-encounter structure recalls a deliberate cinema of encounter and threshold that rewards formal attention.
The decision to keep Manuel and María almost opaque—to let their hospitality remain genuinely mysterious rather than explained—transforms what could be a sentimental beat into something that trusts the viewer's attention completely, and that trust is everything here.