Breve Historia en el Planeta
2015 · 15m · Argentina
Directed by Cristian Jesús Ponce
Genres: adventure, dark comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Two astronauts land on a strange planet and cross the terrain in search of intelligent life. A long-awaited encounter with the local civilisation brings an unexpected setback to the mission.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A sci-fi premise that gets exactly *wrong* everything we expect—two astronauts searching for intelligent life find it, and the film just... walks away from triumph into something darker and weirder. This is the kind of subversive tonal flip that makes you realize you were never actually watching a space adventure.
Ponce situates this squarely in the lineage of absurdist sci-fi (Vigo, early Gondry), where formal restraint and deadpan mise-en-scène do the heavy lifting; the editing rhythm between contemplation and comedy reveals a filmmaker already conscious of his own syntax.
The entire film turns on a single decision—the choice to let silence and stillness carry the 'encounter' rather than spectacle—and that discipline, that refusal to deliver what the premise promises, transforms a small-budget space film into something genuinely unsettling.