A King's Betrayal
2015 · 9m · USA
Directed by David Bornstein
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
Told entirely from the piñata's first-person perspective, the film follows the final 24 hours in the life of a brightly-colored party favor as it contemplates its inevitable destruction at a child's birthday celebration. The mundane object becomes an unlikely tragic hero in a dark comedy meditation on mortality and ritual.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—someone took the absurdist promise of object-as-protagonist seriously instead of winking at it. A piñata's existential dread is exactly the kind of ridiculous premise that shouldn't work but does, precisely because Bornstein commits to the bit with zero irony.
The conceit risks novelty-store whimsy, but the film's structural restraint—maintaining first-person narration across 8 minutes without surrendering to sentimentality—suggests a filmmaker aware of how easily this could collapse into greeting-card pathos.
The decision to sustain the piñata's POV without cutting to external shots of the party forces every emotional beat through voice and interval, which is a severe formal constraint that somehow makes the whole thing breathe—that's the move that earns it.
Reviews
It is astounding how the story of a pulseless thing can even move you to tears. Bornstein repeatedly proves his genius by generating overly understated but oh-so-real-feelings of horror that leaves goosebumps.
The result is unexpectedly engaging and delightfully somber.
Festivals
- Francis Ford Coppola Short Film Competition 2015
- Film Pipeline Short Film Competition 2015