Renacimiento
2010 · 7m · España
Directed by Ignacio Rodó
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A young man who has lived his whole life connected to an artificial respirator decides to sacrifice everything for a few seconds of breathing on his own — a few seconds of life, for the first time since he was born.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be profound but lands in expected territory—a respirator-bound kid choosing death for autonomy is the kind of 'poetic sacrifice' that feels designed to move you rather than genuinely unsettling.
Rodó situates this within a lineage of Latin American contemplative cinema, and the formal restraint—7 minutes of accumulated breath—echoes the durational aesthetics of Lisandro Alonso and Carlos Reygadas, though without their interrogative edge.
There's a single decision here that makes it work: the choice to *not* show the liberation, to cut away before the first independent breath and let the sound design carry the transcendence—that discipline transforms sentimentality into something earned and devastating.