ERE: Expediente de regulación de Enchufes
2013 · 9m · España
Directed by Alicia Puig
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
Through Sofía and her mother, the film portrays Spanish workers and families hit by mass layoffs, in a country where hundreds of companies and thousands of employees face the same loss.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a socioeconomic essay masquerading as intimacy—formally restrained to the point of austerity, which is either radical documentary honesty or the safe choice dressed up as rigor; I'm genuinely unsure, and that's the problem.
Puig's refusal to aestheticize precarity, the deliberate flatness of affect and framing, locates this firmly in a lineage of Spanish social documentary that traces back through Erice and Víctor Erice's material restraint—a film that trusts form to do the moral work.
The decision to anchor the macro-crisis through two specific figures in a single domestic space, refusing montage spectacle or montage of suffering, is what transforms a political subject into something that actually lands in the chest.