The Sad Smell of Flesh

Father of a middle-class family Alfredo Barrera takes his little daughter to school as he does every morning. But today only appears to be the same as the previous days, and his established rituals have a different flavor. Nobody knows that he lost his job a month ago. Nor does anyone know that Alfredo has a plan… For the next ninety minutes, we never let him out of our sight. In one long take without a single cut, we follow Alfredo over his shoulder as he walks the streets of Vigo in Galicia, absorbing the anonymous atmosphere of the big city where posh avenues form an apathetic stage for anonymous human tragedies, and the line of banks remind us of the source of our ubiquitous modern enslavement. The film’s suggestive, minimalist documentary style is also a silent indictment of a subject that plagues Spanish society: evictions as a result of people’s inability to make their mortgage payments are a daily occurrence in Spain. In the past five years alone, there have been 400,000 forced repossessions. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)