El Jamón/The Running Ham
2016 · 18m · España
Directed by Alberto Mazarro, Jorge González, Paco Fox
Javier is a young loser who believes he will win over the girl of his dreams because he has won a ham in a raffle. He begins planning a special dinner with her, with the ham as an excuse, but two men steal it right under his nose.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A raffle ham as the emotional linchpin of a romantic comedy—most writers would've buried this premise in the pitch meeting, but Mazarro and crew lean into the absurdist logic until it becomes genuinely subversive, turning loser-guy-wins-girl tropes inside out through sheer commitment to the ridiculous.
The film's formal control of tone is what impresses: it never winks at the audience about how silly a ham heist is, instead treating the escalation with the formal rigor of a Coen Brothers set piece, which demands a kind of disciplined restraint most comedies can't sustain.
The choice to make the ham itself the emotional proxy for Javier's self-worth—not just a plot device but the actual material stand-in for his romantic aspirations—is the single decision that elevates this from sketch comedy into something with real stakes, even as it remains absurd.