Alejandro Vázquez San Miguel crafts this moving feature film around the figure of his grandparents, two senior citizens whose memory is inseparable from the last century. The desire to reconstruct their history ends up becoming film exercise in how to approach and meticulously observe everyday life in their apartment, the intimacy and the shared space, a farewell letter and an ode to that which survives. (VM)
2022 - DOCLISBOA. Jury Award.
Alejandro Vázquez San Miguel (Madrid, 1976) studied film at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) and at the EICTV (Cuba). He has worked in film since he was a teenager, occupying different positions in production, sound, decoration and direction, with filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Manuel Gómez Pereira, Patricia Ferreira, Gonzalo Suárez and Julio Medem. In addition to making films, he has developed an important activity as a film programmer with an eye always on artistic, cultural and different cinema. His work as a director and producer ranges from the experimental "...in the beginning was the journey" (2008) to the documentary "Woman as a tree", released in 2020, and sponsored by Pedro Costa and winner of numerous national and international awards, including the SOPHIA of the Portuguese Film Academy as Best Documentary Short of the year. "A garden area too quiet for me" is his first non-fiction feature film, premiered at the 20th edition of Doclisboa2022, where it won the Jury Award.