El vendedor

The scouts

A premise this deadpan—selling *stones*—should be insufferable, but Fidalgo's refusal to wink at the camera or explode into surrealist spectacle actually makes it work; the joke is that there's no joke, which somehow lands harder than subversion usually does.

Fidalgo locates himself in a lineage of Buñuelian object-fixation and Beckettian stasis, but the formal restraint—the held gaze, the patient framing—suggests a filmmaker thinking seriously about what contemplative cinema can still accomplish; this is gallery-film rigor that earns its eight minutes.

The entire film turns on a single compositional decision: keeping the vendor and stones centered while the world moves indifferently past them, which transforms what could've been cute whimsy into something genuinely unsettling about desire and attention.