In David Trueba ’s “Always Winter,” the closing night film of this year’s Valladolid Film Festival in Spain, Miguel Mena (David Verdaguer), 40, a jobless landscape architect travels to a Brussels conference to pitch a project, Gardens of Life, in which people are invited to sit on grass or a bench and contemplate three-minute hour-glasses.

“We love hour-glasses because they are a visual representation of time sliding by. They allow is to see the passing of something we never see: the Passage of Time,” Miguel says on stage, commandingly. And then he can’t remember how to go on.

“The importance is to go back to the real world. Technology has become a real religion,” he says in a debate the next day.

Distances apart, Miguel could be talking about David Trueba’s film.

It’s the first ti

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