Vocabulario
2013 · 16m · España
Directed by Sam Baixauli
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Xiaoyan and Werner, two characters who no longer expect anything from their lives, initiate a relationship of friendship that will take them to the deepest part of themselves armed with 'new words, words like flowers' that will explode between their lips, loaded with an enthusiasm and an innocence that they already believed, definitively, lost.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two people with nothing left to lose finding each other through language feels like the most obvious indie move imaginable—but Baixauli's refusal to dramatize their emptiness, letting the words do all the heavy lifting instead, is genuinely perverse in the best way.
Vocabulario positions itself squarely in the lineage of slow cinema and the lyric essay form, where dialogue becomes almost philosophical; the formal restraint and attention to how speech itself can resurrect feeling shows considerable craft awareness.
The decision to let new language—literal new words—be the mechanism of emotional thaw rather than plot incident or confession is what makes this work; it's such a specific, economical choice that transforms a premise about two lonely people into something about the generative power of naming itself.