Brigada de limpieza
2017 · 9m · España
Directed by Iván Tello
Genres: crime, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Ariel and D. Limpio work for a company that erases evidence from crime scenes. The experimental tale reflects on a sad reality where human life counts for nothing.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A film about crime-scene cleaners as philosophical stand-ins for society's moral numbness—it's the kind of conceptual move that should feel cheap but Tello makes it *hurt*. Experimental without being self-conscious about it; the kind of premise that makes you furious other festivals didn't already program it.
Tello positions himself squarely in the lineage of Haneke and Costa—cinema as moral witness, formal austerity as ethical stance—though the execution occasionally privileges concept over the sustained visual rigor that lineage demands. Worth studying for how it negotiates the tension between experimental premise and classical restraint.
The decision to shoot the crime scenes themselves as almost banal, bureaucratic spaces rather than spectacle is what makes this work; that single formal choice—treating horror as labor—transforms what could've been exploitation into something genuinely unsettling and economical.