Bye Little Block!
2020 · 9m · Hungary
Directed by Éva Darabos
Genres: experimental, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A young woman learns she must leave her blockhouse flat; her teardrop of farewell grows into a concrete monolith, and when it hits the ground a surreal panorama of the blockhouse area she used to call home unfolds.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the teardrop-to-monolith metaphor to land soft and poetic; instead Darabos lets it become architecturally grotesque, which is the only reason this premise doesn't collapse into Instagram sentimentality.
A formally exquisite meditation on displacement that understands how surrealism deepens rather than escapes emotional truth—the grammar of its visual transformation (tear → concrete → unfolding panorama) recalls the tonal precision of mid-period Švankmajer, but Darabos finds her own register entirely.
The entire film hinges on that single moment of scale-shift—when the teardrop hits ground and the perspective fractures into a diorama—and the decision to hold on the character's face through it rather than cut away is what makes the surrealism actually *mean* something about loss.