Disonancias
2020 · 18m · España
Directed by Fran Kapilla
Tones: provocative, theatrical
Some aristocrats undertake a journey to present themselves at an opera singing audition. During the trip they will witness a series of injustices and an energetic people protesting; times are changing.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A film that uses the opera audition as a Trojan horse for class warfare—aristocrats collide with actual history and it's deeply uncomfortable, which is exactly the point. Most scouts would've picked the 'polished drama' version; Kapilla instead made something that laughs at refinement while it burns.
The theatrical framework sits in dialogue with a long lineage of satire-through-spectacle, from Buñuel onward, and Kapilla demonstrates formal control in how the contrast between the characters' artifice and the raw injustice they witness is structured through editing and spatial composition.
There's a single choice—the decision to keep the aristocrats' operatic gesturing visible even as the world around them ruptures—that transforms what could've been didactic into something formally alive, and it's executed with enough restraint that the film never tips into sermon.