El aprovechamiento industrial de los cadáveres
2012 · 15m
Directed by Antonio Gómez Rufo
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A humorous Berlanga-inspired proposal satirises modern society's ceremonies around death and funerals in a time of crisis, through the industrial use of corpses.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A Spanish director in 2012 actually pitching industrial corpse recycling as *the solution* to funeral excess—it's genuinely warped, subversive enough to make you uncomfortable about laughing, and exactly the kind of premise that makes other programmers nervous and Felix vindicated.
Rufo's debt to Berlanga's satirical anatomy of Spanish society is evident in the formal control here; the film knows exactly which tradition of grotesque social critique it inhabits, and executes that lineage with precision rather than novelty.
The decision to play this absolutely straight—treating industrial corpse efficiency with bureaucratic deadpan rather than winking at the audience—is what transmutes a one-liner premise into something that actually sticks; that tonal discipline on what's clearly a modest budget is the whole film.