Aceite rancio
2015 · 13m · España
Directed by David Heredia
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
The oil economy is run by the Marqués, a president out only for his own benefit, while oil merchant Silvio imposes his law and olive farmer Luichi becomes entangled in a legal process with the Marqués, who wants his lands.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Spanish oil-baron satire that wears its political teeth so casually you almost miss them—until the absurdity of power games and land theft becomes the only sane lens. Most scouts would file this under 'worthy drama'; Felix sees a film that treats corruption like a darkly comic inevitability, which is way more dangerous.
Heredia situates himself in a lineage of Latin American political cinema with formal restraint, letting the 13-minute runtime breathe between scenes of accumulation and dispossession rather than overplaying the satire. The tonal control—knowing when to let tension sit and when to fracture it with dark humor—suggests a filmmaker aware of how to construct meaning through pacing itself.
The film's entire architecture pivots on a single choice: treating Luichi's entanglement not as tragedy but as bureaucratic theatre, which reframes the whole power dynamic and makes the Marqués's casual villainy feel almost system-level rather than personal. That tonal pivot, made quietly in the editing and performance choices, is what elevates a straightforward land-grab story into something that actually sticks.