Despidiendo que es gerundio
2012 · 4m · España
Directed by Vier Castellanos
Genres: dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A small caricature of the labour-reform era shows how easy firing a worker has become, although some cases prove more complicated than others.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A four-minute Spanish labor-law satire that treats bureaucratic cruelty as pure slapstick — most scouts would file this under 'political message' and move on, but Castellanos actually makes firing funny by refusing to make it tragic, which is a much weirder and braver move.
The film's formal restraint (that four-minute constraint, the caricature aesthetic) grounds what could've been a one-note polemic into something closer to Beckettian bureaucratic theater; it knows its lineage — absurdist protest cinema — and executes within those formal boundaries with discipline.
The decision to render the workers and bosses as exaggerated caricatures rather than realistic figures is what unlocks the absurdist tone and prevents the premise from collapsing into preachy agitprop; that single stylistic choice is doing all the heavy lifting on a micro-budget.