Fracaso escolar
2012 · 7m · España
Directed by Gracia Querejeta
Genres: comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A mother and son wait for the school bus, taking turns to sit because the vehicle can only be seen while standing, and as always they miss it.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A seven-minute film about missing the bus shouldn't work, but Querejeta has engineered pure logic-defying absurdism—the rule itself (you can only see it standing) becomes the trap, and watching them oscillate between hope and resignation is genuinely, weirdly funny in a way that makes you question why school-day failure needs to be this darkly clever.
Querejeta's formal restraint—the fixed frame, the ritualistic alternation between mother and son, the accumulating dread of repetition—locates this within a lineage of Beckettian waiting and deadpan European comedy, each compositional choice reinforcing the absurdist premise with architectural precision.
The masterstroke is the sound design's refusal to give them the bus horn they're listening for; that sustained absence of audio payoff transforms the premise from gimmick into something genuinely unsettling, and it's all done on what must be a shoestring budget and a single location.