El director maldito
2017 · 25m
Directed by Maxi Campo
Genres: biography, comedy, documentary
Tones: darkly comic, humorous
A journalistic investigation follows a young short-film director's outsized obsession with getting one of his films selected at the local festival of his dreams.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A meta-documentary about a guy's delusional festival chase sounds like it could be treacly garbage, but Campo weaponizes the absurdity—the obsession becomes genuinely unsettling, the comedy lands hardest when you're uncomfortable, and it refuses the easy catharsis everyone expects.
The film positions itself cleverly within the tradition of self-reflexive cinema and festival-culture critique, though the tonal balance between documentary earnestness and comedy occasionally destabilizes the formal architecture that might have elevated it.
The decision to follow the director's actual submissions and rejections with deadpan journalistic distance rather than scored melodrama is what makes this work—that restraint, that refusal to manipulate, is the entire film.