Diario de un voyeur: Búhos y Palomas
2019 · 3m · España
Directed by Luken Sánchez
Genres: comedy, fantasy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
The neighbours are convinced that their plastic owls will scare away the pigeons, with the purpose of keeping the community away from the birds' excrement; meanwhile, they keep throwing their cigarette butts over the balcony, deranged to see that their strategy is useless, but what they do not know is that the pigeons and the owls are now in cahoots to make this neighbourhood a real hell.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A three-minute anarchist fable where the supposed solution (plastic owls) becomes the setup for a pigeon-and-owl alliance against human stupidity — it's the kind of premise that sounds like a fever dream until you realize it's a perfect inversion of every pest-control narrative ever made.
Sánchez works within a lineage of absurdist fable stretching back through Buñuel and Vigo, using the domestic balcony as a stage where social pretense crumbles into slapstick naturalism, though the satirical throughline occasionally overwhelms the formal architecture that could elevate it.
The decision to make the animals' conspiracy the *actual* plot rather than anthropomorphic window dressing — treating their coordination with the same deadpan conviction as the neighbours' futile ritual — is what transforms a gag into something genuinely unsettling.