Asamblea. Largometraje español de Álex Montoya
2019 · 16m · España
Directed by Alex Montoya
At the last assembly before summer, Josep is determined to get the draft for a concert approved at all costs, while the members struggle to reach an agreement that respects every ideology and every turn to speak.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 16-minute procedural about parliamentary tedium shouldn't work, but Montoya mines genuine absurdist horror from the gap between democratic process and human chaos—it's the kind of film that makes you laugh at the machinery before you realize it's laughing at you.
The film sits astutely within a lineage of European political satire and Kaurismäki-esque deadpan formalism, deploying the assembly setting as both literal constraint and formal discipline, though its satirical teeth feel somewhat familiar in execution.
What elevates this beyond sketch comedy is Montoya's decision to hold the camera static and let the cacophony build through layered voices and interruption—a single formal choice that transforms a one-joke premise into something genuinely destabilizing.