Carne con papas
2015 · 11m · Venezuela
Directed by Luis Rahamut
Genres: crime, dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
Ivon endures a street robbery and then boards a bus, where pirate-film seller Dudamel robs passengers again. Driver and passengers seize Dudamel, the weapon falls into Ivon's hands, and Ivon has nothing left to lose.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A street robbery that loops into another robbery that detonates into something unhinged — Rahamut takes the tired mugging-gone-wrong premise and refuses to let it resolve conventionally, pivoting instead into absurdist fatalism where the gun becomes a punchline and a threat simultaneously. This is the kind of tonal instability that makes most programmers squirm, and it's exactly why it works.
The film's restraint in mise-en-scène and its deliberate staging of each robbery as a formal echo of the last suggests a filmmaker aware of crime-cinema lineage while interrogating its mechanics; the bus becomes a contained pressure chamber that recalls both Buñuel's social critique and the genre's own recycled violence, which is thoughtful but somewhat familiar.
The moment Ivon's hand closes around the weapon — a single cut that shifts the entire moral weight from victim to something unnamed — is where this 11 minutes transcends its modest scope; that one gesture, and the camera's refusal to telegraph what comes next, is the decision that makes the whole thing breathe.