Silencio
2017 · 9m · España
Directed by Juan Calvo, Luis Pérez
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Juanjo, a writer of a single success, tries to find his lost inspiration. His wife and children's trip seems to give him the tranquillity and silence he needs to work, but sometimes silence is the worst lie.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise reads like therapy-workshop material—blocked writer finds silence, silence betrays him—but the film seems to actually believe in its own melancholy rather than interrogate it, which is exactly the kind of sincere restraint that bores me.
A formally composed meditation on the paradox of artistic solitude that owes a clear debt to the European contemplative tradition; the restraint in editing and sound design suggests filmmakers aware of what Bresson and Tarkovsky already proved about negative space and waiting.
The wife and children's absence becomes the film's actual subject, and there's a particular choice—likely in how the silence is *mixed*, or when a small domestic sound intrudes—that seems to shoulder all the thematic weight that a nine-minute runtime can't afford to spell out.