CouchSurfing
2017 · 2m · España
Directed by Juan Trueba
Tones: contemplative, humorous
Nico is a cool, free-spirited guy who finds in Couchsurfing the ideal way to meet people and new experiences. Juan does not find the idea so funny: how can he be so selfish?
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is almost too clean—generational conflict wrapped in travel-app irony—but the real subversion is how Trueba refuses to let either character win, which most filmmakers would botch.
A tidy two-minute moral tableau with clear compositional choices, though it settles into a fairly conventional wisdom-of-age register rather than interrogating its own formal constraints.
Trueba's decision to let the humor live entirely in behavioral contradiction—Nico's obliviousness played straight, Juan's judgment wordless and patient—transforms a thin premise into something genuinely tender on a micro-budget.