“I try to hold on to it, for fear of losing it forever,” reflects eighty-year-old Antonio, recalling the image of a babysitter from his childhood that came to him in a dream. From the very beginning of Argentine filmmaker Carlos Sorín's The Window, we are acutely aware of the forward motion of time-the inescapable, progressive path that consistently delivers the present to the past. The significance of this is not lost on the bedridden Antonio, determined to prepare a perfect homecoming for his long-estranged son who had left the old Patagonian hacienda for Europe many years earlier in pursuit of a career as a concert pianist. As he waits for his son's visit, confined to his room by doctor's orders, a look out the window stirs within him the desire for one last walk through his fields, the need to relish the loveliness of the landscape and once again experience the vibrancy of life. What results is not simply a moving meditation on aging and death, but an elegantly lyrical and humanistic film. Sorín tells one of his “minimal” stories here, as he did with his earlier masterpiece, Historias Mínimas, in which a series of seemingly inconsequential moments and details ultimately come together in a synthesis of life-affirming beauty. If the cinema has the transcendent capacity to reveal hidden truths imperceptible to the naked eye yet perceived by our hearts, as Bela Balász has observed, The Window certainly makes a strong case for such a capacity.