Atasco
2009 · 12m · España
Directed by Anna Peris Lluch
Genres: experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Oscar lies upside down as thoughts run across asphalt, glass and red shoes, while Laura sits trapped in a traffic jam with thoughts locked among heat, hurry and horn sounds. Hidden brakes keep both figures from advancing.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most experimental shorts fold under their own pretension, but Atasco earns its surrealism by refusing to explain the parallel logic of Oscar and Laura—the formal restraint is what makes the weirdness stick.
Lluch constructs a meditation on paralysis with the precision of a structural filmmaker; the counterpoint between horizontal and vertical bodies, the deliberate repetition of obstruction, positions this firmly in the lineage of structural cinema while remaining completely its own object.
The genius move is holding the camera still on both figures while thought patterns literally traverse the frame—that single decision to visualize interiority as movement across surfaces rather than within bodies transforms what could be static into something hypnotic.