Volveré
2017 · 1m · España
Directed by John Aguiler
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Catalina finds a bottle of wine with a husband's message promising return, placed at a love corner, and prepares a dinner for two repeated day after day. As waiting stretches, Catalina accepts absence and reaches for the unopened bottle, until a telephone rings.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a love story told backwards through absence—which sounds precious until you realize Aguiler's actually using the waiting as a formal constraint, not emotional wallowing, and that telephone ring is genuinely heretical in ways most sentimentalists won't risk.
A one-minute study in how cinema renders time through repetition and restraint; the dailiness of her ritual sits in direct dialogue with Bresson's *Lancelot du Lac* and the sparse formalism of 90s European minimalism, and the ending earns its tenderness through compositional discipline rather than sentiment.
Aguiler's real move is the sound design—that repeating dinner-setting rhythm against deepening silence—which transforms what could be maudlin into something architecturally sound, each day's ring of a glass becoming the film's structural spine.