CO-DO
2025 · 7m · España
Directed by Cucho L. Capilla
Genres: experimental, historical, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
In 1945, an expedition from the planet Zarathis arrived in Melilla with peaceful intentions. Received with honours, the extraterrestrial visitors participated in official ceremonies, discovering the essence of the city and its people, in a period-documentary style reliving this unusual encounter.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
CO-DO takes the most boring conceivable frame—a period documentary about an official state visit—and smuggles an alien first-contact narrative underneath it like contraband; the joke lands because Capilla commits to the bit with zero winking, letting the absurdity of treating extraterrestrials as diplomatic guests do all the heavy lifting.
The film's formal restraint is its strongest asset, maintaining the aesthetic protocols of mid-century documentary photography while the premise quietly destabilizes every assumption about what we're watching, creating a productive tension between form and content that recalls the structural experimentalism of Hanoi Tuesday or The Atomic Cafe.
The decision to never break the documentary tone—no reaction shots, no dramatic music, just the flat archival voice treating impossible events as mundane fact—is what transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely unsettling, letting the cognitive dissonance do the storytelling work that lesser films would hammer with effects or score.