A Guitar in the Bucket
2025 · 15m
Directed by Boyoung Kim
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
In a world where almost anything can be rented from vending machines, a girl dreams of becoming a guitarist, but the people around her choose otherwise for her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the vending machine world to be a gimmick—a cute dystopia prop—but Kim lets it sit there, mundane and suffocating, while the real subversion happens in the margins: a girl's dream dying not with a bang but through ambient social pressure. Genuinely unsettling.
The formal restraint here—how Kim frames the vending machines as architectural inevitability rather than satire—places this in conversation with Kiarostami and the tradition of ambient social critique through spatial design; the guitar becomes less symbol than counterpoint to a world of frictionless consumption.
The decision to keep the guitar *out of frame* for most of the runtime—we hear it, we see her longing, but the machine-world keeps intervening—is the hinge that makes this work; it's a small film that understands exactly where to withhold the payoff.
Reviews
Boyoung Kim liefert mit „A Guitar in the Bucket“ einen surrealen Blick auf die Zukunft unserer Gesellschaft. In dem animierten Kurzfilm kann man so ziemlich alles an Automaten ziehen und für eine gewisse Dauer mieten.