El Libro Rojo: El Tiempo
2020 · 3m · México
Directed by Héctor Maya Requena
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, provocative
Azul, an activist committed to social movements at UNAM, and her brother León, a misogynistic campus thug, hold opposite ideas. One day they become victims of their own worlds.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A three-minute political guillotine: sibling ideologies don't just clash, they cannibalize each other in real time, and the film seems genuinely gleeful about refusing to let either of them survive intact. This is the kind of premise that makes consensus programmers nervous, which is exactly why it works.
Requena demonstrates formal control in compressing political contradiction into a domestic crucible, though the dark comedy's tonal register sits uneasily between satire and tragedy—a risk that doesn't quite resolve into the kind of considered statement that lingers after the frame cuts.
The coup is in the timing of that final irony: watching both characters become instruments of the very systems they oppose happens in a single, brutal cut that reframes everything before it. That one structural choice is the whole film.