El ladrón de lluvia
2023 · 14m · España
Directed by Luis Sánchez
Genres: dark comedy, drama, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, melancholic, mythic
Raimundo Polvorín, a ruined and deranged farmer, decides to put an end to the cause of all his ills: something that appears in the sky on storm days, depriving him of a good as essential and scarce as water. The audacity will cost him dearly.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A farmer wages war against *weather itself* — not as metaphor, but as literal antagonist — and the film refuses to wink at the absurdity, which is exactly why it works. Most shorts would bury this premise under symbolism; Sánchez just lets Raimundo's deranged logic breathe, and suddenly you're watching a genre that doesn't have a name.
Sánchez positions this within a lineage of magical realist fable—García Márquez's DNA is visible—but the restraint in execution, the way myth and melancholy coexist without collapsing into sentimentality, marks a formal maturity that earns the film's tonal ambitions.
The choice to play this completely straight, to never nudge the audience toward irony even when a man is hunting the sky, transforms what could be merely clever into something genuinely unsettling—and that tonal discipline is the whole film.