Desearía

"Even though you flow through me, with each day I feel more and more empty. I come here to fill that void."

As a young woman (Monserrat Montero Cole) circles a stone fountain alone by night, her voiceover (in Spanish) reveals that she is in the throes of loss. Meanwhile the water itself refracts the light in an endless kaleidoscopic cascade, all at once figuring the ephemerality of human experience, as well as mimicking the downward drip of a tear. "I wish" (or "desearía" in the original Spanish), the woman says, throwing in a coin – but she wishes not so much for a better future as for a past still preserved in the present.

For his eighth short film, Alexander Berberich has crafted a delicate locus amoenus - a place of calm isolation where his protagonist can contemplate, perhaps even soothe, her heartfelt sorrow. Knowing that the director lost his own father shortly before making this film might help explain where this elegiac moodpiece film is coming from – but it channels a universally familiar kind of grief and yearning with which any viewer will easily be able to identify.

"I wish you were here," the woman says, "Here with me" – and for the duration of this film, we are there with her, and share her heightened sense of loss, even as the gentle sound of the flowing water brings its own catharsis. It is a brief but beautiful moment of, yet also outside of, time itself, elegantly composed and filtered through the distorting lens of melancholy.