We are always at war (Siempre estamos en guerra)
2025 · 3m
Directed by Celia Pérez Gil
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A personal video essay, seen through the director's father's gaze, reflects on the past and above all the present, offering a social critique from someone who flees convention.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A video essay that actually earns its provocation—Pérez Gil doesn't just *say* something uncomfortable about war and family, she reframes the entire apparatus of looking (the father's gaze) as the site of critique, which is sneaky enough to make the essay form feel dangerous again.
The formal decision to filter personal reflection through the father's perspective creates a deliberate estrangement that sits squarely in the lineage of essay cinema from Farocki to Marker—three minutes of measured form doing the ideological work, not the voiceover.
The choice to position the camera *within* the father's viewpoint rather than simply documenting him transforms what could be a straightforward family documentary into something that interrogates complicity itself; that single structural decision is what makes the personal suddenly political.