Express
2016 · 13m · España
Directed by Carlos Olalla, Juan Herreros
Genres: documentary, drama
Tones: melancholic, provocative
A Senegalese man settled in Spain with his wife and children loses his residence permit after becoming unemployed; one day two police officers invite him to the station for 'a matter of his interest', and two days later he is flown to Senegal despite his lawyer's efforts.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to make the immigration-crisis short; Olalla and Herreros skip the expected emotional crescendo and just... document the bureaucratic evisceration with deadpan precision, which is somehow more devastating and a lot less predictable than the usual tearjerker.
A formally austere piece that inherits from Wiseman's observational cinema and the Spanish documentary tradition—the restraint in editing, the refusal to score or manipulate, the way the mundane becomes the mechanism of erasure—all mark this as work aware of its own lineage and rigorously committed to it.
The decision to keep the camera locked and static during the police station sequences transforms what could've been performative suffering into something unbearable precisely because we're watching it the way paperwork gets watched: with no fanfare, just the sound of a life being filed away.