El audífono
2011 · 14m · España
Directed by Pau Durá
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
After a long workday, M. rides a bus home with hearing problems and uses a hearing aid to listen to surrounding travellers. Words overheard may have little to do with what passengers think or feel.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A hearing aid as portal to unreliable narration—neat inversion of the usual disability narrative, though the surreal-speech-mismatch trick could've gone weirder, more weaponized against our comfort.
Durá works within a lineage of phenomenological cinema and sound-as-form, where the technical apparatus becomes the lens; the film's restraint and structural clarity position it as a considered intervention in how we frame perception.
The decision to let the hearing aid *be* the unreliable narrator—layering distorted dialogue over mundane bus-riders—does the entire conceptual work in one elegant sound design choice, and that specificity is what transforms a simple premise into something haunting.