Valentín Nueda, Vampiro de Madrid
2021 · 29m · España
Directed by Ignacio Grifol
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A documentary tribute to a beloved Madrid open-mic rhapsode known as the Vampire of Madrid, who died of COVID in April, as remembered by the regulars of those spaces.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A grief documentary about a street poet feels like the safest possible film until you realize Grifol isn't interested in redemption or uplift—just the messy, unglamorous texture of how people actually remember someone they loved, which is somehow more subversive than any formal gimmick could be.
Grifol's restraint in letting the regulars speak without compositional flourish or narrative scaffolding places this firmly in the tradition of Agnès Varda's portraiture—a film that trusts observation and duration to do the curatorial work, treating memory itself as a formal problem.
The decision to shoot in what feels like real-time conversation, letting overlapping voices and awkward silences breathe instead of cutting them into neat testimonial bites, is what transforms a memorial into something that actually *feels* like sitting in a room where someone is missing.