Los saldos

Tired of failing to find a job in the city, director Raúl Capdevila returns to the childhood home of his father, the last of three generations of farmers and ranchers in Binéfar, Huesca. Father and son go back to working together, while the construction of a huge slaughterhouse is announced in the village. The documentary's scope gets stretched beyond its limits and ends up becoming an extraordinary revisionist anti-western about the decline of an old world, one besieged by industrial transformations. A transcendentally beautiful film that reflects on the meaning and disappearance of old rituals and customs. (VM)