GARBAGE

The autumn of the park is the autumn of life for a man tested by fate.

As nature sheds its leaves, carpetting the ground in rust and gold, the man sits in solitude upon a secluded bench. To him, the crunch of dry leaves is no melody; it is merely the sound of something dying.

He was raised amidst the pangs of hunger and the shards of a stolen childhood in Villa 31—one of Argentina’s villas miserias—where poverty ran so deep that even refuse was a dreamt-of treasure. Today, he leads a life of comfort, yet he has forged an armour of cynicism to shield himself from a world that has always failed him; a world he now despises for its lack of values and its habit of waste.

The grey of his gaze is suddenly broken by the sight of a young girl who seems crafted from light and wind. She does not merely walk; she dances through the avenues, beholding every leaf as if it were a jewel.

His autumn is a monotone; hers is an explosion of colour. She is vibrant, as if painted in warm watercolours and fluid lines; he is defined by angular strokes, desaturated tones, and ghosts that seem to weigh physically upon his shoulders.

The girl sits beside him and, with a vitality that borders on the irritating, attempts to show him the beauty of nature and of life. But the man’s heart is a barren land. For every ray of sunlight she offers, he counters with the shadow of a past betrayal or the weight of a former deprivation.

They never truly look at one another; each speaks with eyes fixed on the void before them. Only for a fleeting moment do their eyes meet. It feels like a small breach in the walls of his heart… a faint smile flickering in contrast to her crystalline laughter.

But his negativity is a dense fog that begins, slowly, to dim even the girl’s colours. Despite his bitterness, she continues to radiate light until the friction between them becomes unbearable.

The girl vanishes, leaving the man alone as grief begins to wash away all the colours she had painted around him. He is left in the monochromatic silence of one who has suffered too much to ever trust in beauty again.

Directed by
Giulia Morlacchi