Coleguita de la calle
2009 · 4m · España
Directed by Paco Sordo
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Two homeless men meet on the street and chat calmly together. One of them, however, seems to attract blows from others with unusual ease.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A four-minute animation that turns homelessness into a darkly comic premise—one guy just gets repeatedly punched by the universe while his friend watches—is exactly the kind of absurdist flip that makes you laugh and then immediately feel weird about it. Sordo commits to the bit with zero sentimentality, which is why it actually lands.
The film sits in an interesting formal tradition of Spanish absurdist animation, though the tonal control wavers between observational comedy and something darker that it doesn't quite resolve; the constraint of four minutes works both for and against the conceptual clarity here.
The entire film hinges on a single directorial choice—playing the violence as mundane, almost offhand, while the two characters remain emotionally present and conversational—and that restraint is what keeps this from becoming cruelty and makes it genuinely unsettling instead.