Alto sauce
2011 · 18m · España
Directed by Fernando Pomares
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Twenty years after a crime in the village of Alto Sauce, the case is reopened and the members of the community must confront their own statements, in a mirror game between past, present and a lie that never disappeared.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Crime procedural on its surface, but the real subversion is how Pomares weaponizes unreliable testimony itself—the whole village becomes a chorus of liars, and truth becomes just another suspect. It's the kind of structural game that makes you distrust narrative in ways most shorts don't even attempt.
A rigorous examination of how memory and complicity layer over time, executed with the formal precision of a classical investigation—the editing rhythm mirrors the interrogation structure, and that mirror-game framing announces itself as deliberate formal choice, not accident. This is a short aware of its own relationship to the crime drama lineage, and it earns the weight it carries.
The masterstroke is the decision to let testimony contradict itself in real time rather than cut away—Pomares holds on faces and silence long enough that the audience becomes the detective, and that single commitment to non-resolution over tidy narrative closure reframes the entire modest production as something morally complex.