The Resurrection Club
2016 · 26m · España
Directed by Álvaro Corcuera, Guillermo Abril
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Ron, Shujaa, Greg and Albert are four exonerated friends who set out to end capital punishment. This is their individual and collective struggle, and that of the wives, sisters and daughters who stood by their side, on a journey across the United States from Texas to Washington.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A documentary about death row exonerations should be heavy-handed activism, but Corcuera and Abril refuse the obvious—they're more interested in the texture of survival and the quiet marriages that held these men together than scoring points. It's restraint as subversion.
The film's formal architecture—moving four narratives across a geographic and moral landscape while centering the women's testimonies—recalls the best of social documentary tradition while advancing it; this is how you build a polyphonic portrait without dissolving into sentiment.
The decision to shoot the journey as a kind of pilgrimage rather than argument—letting silences and car windows and small gestures of touch between partners do the work—turns what could've been rhetorical into something devastatingly human on a modest budget.