The Sad Smell of Flesh

(festival title)
  • Spain El triste olor de la carne
Trailer

Plots(1)

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)

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Reviews (1)

Filmmaniak 

all reviews of this user

English A Spanish drama that takes place in a single shot - an hour and a half of film completely without any cuts. An interesting experiment, but this does not guarantee a quality film. It's all about a man walking around town selling his things. The journey by car takes five minutes, climbing the stairs two minutes, walking down the street four minutes, driving in a taxi six minutes…it’s extremely boring, and the final revelation of the hero's motivation does not help. ()