Sintra III
2020 · 12m · España
Directed by Aitor Echeverría, Iván Casajús
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Haunted by the memory of his girlfriend Elena's fatal accident, Oscar finds a box of her old mixtapes after a puncture on a work trip. He keeps driving, listening to songs that carry him back into their past.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A grief-via-mixtape narrative is exactly the kind of well-trodden emotional territory that makes me suspicious, but if there's a formal or tonal twist buried in here that actually earns the sentimentality, I haven't found it yet — and that's the problem.
The mixtape as narrative scaffold sits comfortably in the lineage of memory-cinema, and one suspects the editing rhythm is calibrated to match the songs' emotional arcs; the question is whether Echeverría and Casajús achieve the formal precision that would elevate this into genuine consideration.
What matters here is likely the *specific* moment when Oscar's driving and a particular lyric or beat synchronizes with a visual memory — that's where the filmmakers either nail the alchemy of sound and image colliding with grief, or they lose us entirely.