Tengo párkinson
2022 · 12m · España
Directed by Paloma García
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
From the Association of relatives and Parkinson's patients of Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, they tell how they live the illness, their day-to-day life, their enthusiasm for living, and who they were before and who they are now.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a Parkinson's doc to be grief-porn or inspiration theater, and García seems to just... let people be themselves—which somehow feels more radical than any formal experiment could. It's boring in the way the truth is boring, and that's the subversion.
The film inherits a lineage of participatory documentary practice—direct address, intimate testimony, the collective voice—but what grounds it is a restraint that feels almost classical: no score manipulation, no editorial mercy, just presence across time.
The decision to let silences breathe, to cut *away* from the moment of emotional crescendo rather than toward it, creates this strange effect where the viewer has to meet the subject halfway instead of being guided—a single structural choice that reframes what dignity looks like in documentary.