Bread Will Walk
2025 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Alex Boya
Genres: dark comedy, horror, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A corporation's miracle bread turns everyone who eats it into walking loaves, and a devoted sister tries to rescue her little bread-brother from a hungry mob as reason crumbles.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A corporation monetizes transcendence through bread and gets body horror—this is the kind of premise that makes you laugh and recoil simultaneously, and most scouts would've passed on it as too silly until it lands with genuine dread. Boya's refusal to wink at the audience while playing it completely straight is exactly the subversive move that separates the interesting shorts from the polite ones.
The film's tonal control—balancing absurdist premise with genuine emotional stakes around sibling devotion—shows a director aware of how surrealism functions as formal language rather than mere spectacle. There's a lineage here (Kaufman, perhaps some European body-horror tradition) that Boya respects while charting something distinctly her own.
The decision to treat the bread-transformation not as a punchline but as an irreversible consequence forces the sister's rescue attempt into something genuinely tragic, and that tonal pivot—where the absurdist setup becomes a container for real loss—is what transforms an 11-minute premise into something that sticks.