A Kaffa
2011 · 8m · France
Directed by Joan Baz, Lionel Caruana, Margaux Demont, Bastien Martin
Genres: dark comedy, fantasy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A megalomaniac leader ruling a coffee-plantation land reads his empire's future in his coffee cup, is haunted by an illusory second self warning of an exterior threat, and builds a fort around his people until they rise up against him.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Four directors collaborating on a dystopian coffee-plantation parable that weaponizes divination and paranoia—it's exactly the kind of premise that makes you go 'wait, WHAT?' and actually *works* as satire without winking at the audience. The second self as external threat is a formally weird choice that most scouts would punt on, which is precisely why it's worth picking.
A formally considered piece that sits in productive conversation with Kafkaesque allegory and the absurdist tradition, trading psychological realism for ritualized image and symbol—the four-director collective speaks to a deliberate compositional method that rewards close viewing.
The decision to literalize the protagonist's paranoia through a hallucinatory double is economical filmmaking that does enormous thematic work without spectacle; on an 8-minute budget, that one recurring visual turns a political fable into something genuinely unsettling.