All the Pain in the World
2014 · 12m · United Kingdom
Directed by Tommaso Pitta
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
London, Christmas time: a man desperately tries to save the life of a minuscule fish, and the situation spirals out of control.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man loses his mind over a fish while London crumbles around him—it's absurdist escalation that reads like a darkly comic parable about misplaced desperation, the kind of premise that makes you squint and laugh uncomfortably because it refuses to settle into tidy meaning.
Pitta's control of tone and pacing suggests a lineage of European absurdist cinema—the film's restraint in treating an ridiculous premise with genuine formal precision creates the kind of conceptual tension that lingers in the mind.
The genius move here is committing entirely to the fish's fragility as the emotional anchor: every decision—the scale of the tank, the sound design of water, the actor's genuine panic—hinges on that one choice to treat the stakes as real, and it transforms the whole absurdist machinery into something unexpectedly moving.
Festivals
- Luxor African Film Festival 2016, Official Selection
- London Short Film Festival 2015, Nomination for Best Comedy Film