Agur
2013 · 17m · España
Directed by David Pérez Sañudo
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
After a young woman dies from a rubber bullet fired by Basque police, a non-nationalist politician finds a painted target on his front door, raising the question of who is behind the threat.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Agur wants to be a political thriller but keeps apologizing for it—the painted target should be screaming, instead the film hedges into procedural ambiguity when it should be wallowing in the mess of who-did-what and why that ambiguity even matters. It's the kind of film that thinks restraint is the same thing as intelligence.
Sañudo constructs a taut political allegory grounded in genuine Basque tensions, letting formal restraint do the argumentative work—the painted door becomes an impossible mirror, and the non-nationalist protagonist's paralysis reads as both character crisis and structural meditation on power and culpability. It's a film aware of its own political cinema lineage.
The real craft choice here is the decision to keep the camera still when everything else is in motion—that static framing of domestic space under threat does more to communicate dread than any editing flourish could, transforming a modest seventeen minutes into something that feels genuinely dangerous through pure compositional discipline.