GFF 2013: Pablo's Winter

A sustained and intimate portrait absent of cameras or crew, Pablo’s Winter is a documentary posing as fiction. This considered, some of the pithy exchanges between grumpy old man Pablo and his long-suffering wife seem almost too comic to be true. These conversational gems offer welcome moments of pace within the real-time experiences of a man enduring his winter years in Almadén, a small town deadened after the closure of its mercury mines.

Smoking 20 cigarettes a day since he was 12, Pablo is a man for whom five heart attacks are no reason to give up on life and who, when finally persuaded to dance with his wife at a function, tells her, “Don’t get used to this.” While a little more narrative direction would tie the film's episodic snapshots together, the slow, ruminative pace allows for the opportunity to simply enjoy watching clouds roll by. When rendered this beautifully, time standing still is no bad thing. [Jac Mantle]