Videoclub
2015 · 8m · España
Directed by Álam Raja
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Pedro works in one of the few remaining video rental shops, once the only temple of cinema before the Internet; for Nacho, this shop is the definitive one.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's doing the nostalgia-for-video-stores thing now, but Raja somehow resists the easy sentimentality—there's a real standoff between preservation and obsolescence that doesn't resolve into comfort, which is genuinely bracing.
A formally assured meditation on cinema's material history and the spaces that held it sacred; the film's restraint and tonal precision locate it squarely in the lineage of Koreeda and early Desplechin—small-scale, thematically rigorous, built to last.
The genius is in how Raja uses the video rental shop itself as the protagonist's emotional register: every cut to a shelf, every held shot on a spine, becomes the actual performance, turning scarcity of dialogue into abundance of visual argument.