El Bache
2008 · 14m · Cuba , España
Directed by Javier Ramon Velez, Juan Caunedo Domínguez
Three friends set out to fix a pothole on their neighborhood street in Cuba. Bureaucracy and shortages of materials discourage them before they even begin the paperwork.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A short that treats Soviet-style bureaucratic gridlock as high comedy—it's the anti-infrastructure film, where the system's inertia becomes the actual antagonist, and three ordinary guys become absurdist rebels just by trying to fill out a form. Everyone else would've made this sentimental or preachy; these directors found the dark joke in the machinery itself.
The restraint here is what lands: a deadpan observation of how institutions calcify, shot with the clarity of a Kiarostami or early Erice, where every bureaucratic obstacle is rendered with anthropological precision rather than caricature. It's sitcom DNA filtered through a deeply political sensibility.
The genius move is the decision to make the paperwork itself the narrative spine—not the pothole, not the friendship, but the crushing logic of forms and signatures—which reframes what could've been a predictable underdog story into something genuinely disorienting and funny.