El derecho de las patatas
2001 · 17m · España
Directed by Mercedes Gaspar
Genres: documentary, experimental, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
The personal memories, passions and misfortunes of an experimental filmmaker are condensed around her alter ego María Martín and her ten-year-old double, in a collage of object animation, home video and musical parody.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A filmmaker weaponizing her own archive against narrative convention—stuffing autobiography, object animation, and musical send-ups into a shape that refuses to cohere into anything digestible. This is exactly the kind of formal anarchy that makes other scouts nervous and makes me pay attention.
Gaspar's collage methodology echoes the structural experiments of expanded cinema, though the personal-essay framework pulls it toward something more diffuse; the ten-year-old double device is narratively generative but the tonal shifts between animation, home video, and parody occasionally work against formal cohesion rather than toward it.
The decision to splice her actual childhood footage against an animated alter ego—having them occupy the same temporal and emotional space—is what transforms what could've been self-indulgent archival noodling into something genuinely affecting about time and doubling.