El palo
2014 · 3m · España
Directed by Miki Esparbé
Genres: experimental, romance
Tones: contemplative, tender
With a selfie stick as an excuse and the grandeur of Barcelona as a backdrop, the naturalness and familiarity of a couple bring us closer to the minuscule things… that change everything.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A selfie stick love letter sounds like the worst indie cliché ever made, and yet Esparbé somehow weaponizes the most obnoxious tech accessory into a meditation on presence and touch—the subversion is so quiet you almost miss it.
The film sits knowingly in the lineage of durational cinema and intimate portraiture, where the formal constraint of the selfie stick's fixed frame becomes a disciplined argument about attention and composition.
That decision to let the selfie stick's mechanical limitation—its fixed distance, its slight wobble—become the entire emotional grammar of the piece is what transforms three minutes of a couple into something that feels inevitable.