En el fondo del mar
2015 · 1m · España
Directed by Joan Paüls
Tones: darkly comic, whimsical
A group of unsuccessful filmmakers plot to recover from the bottom of the sea the Goya statuette that tsunami survivor María Belón threw into the ocean, planning to sell it to finance their dream film.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A one-minute heist comedy premised on recovering a Goya statue thrown into the sea by a tsunami survivor to fund a film about making films—it's the kind of recursively absurd, high-concept premise that most scouts would dismiss as too cute, but Paüls executes it with enough deadpan commitment that the sheer audacity becomes the point.
The film's brevity and tonal control feel indebted to a lineage of European experimental comedy, though the premise's self-referential layers about art-as-currency risk collapsing under their own cleverness without sustained formal discipline across just sixty seconds.
The entire film hinges on whether you buy the emotional logic of María Belón's original act of renunciation—one choice about how to frame that backstory determines whether the whole venture reads as cynical satire or genuinely touching, and Paüls commits to the latter in a way that smaller-budget shorts rarely do with such restraint.