Gotelé
2018 · 4m · España
Directed by Rogelio Sastre
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Fernando works as a telemarketer and wants to remove textured coating from home walls. Bad decorative, work and spiritual decisions meet the straightening power of a mother and croquettes.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A telemarketer scraping textured walls while his mother wields croquettes as spiritual correction—this is the kind of premise that makes you laugh because it shouldn't exist, and yet it does, with total conviction. Sastre's refusing every expected beat, mixing kitchen-sink realism with surrealist domestic economics, and that's exactly the subversive voice most scouts would nervously pass on.
Gotelé sits in a lineage of Spanish absurdist comedy that recalls Álex de la Iglesia's formal playfulness, using domestic texture and maternal authority as both metaphorical and literal visual motifs with notable restraint. The construction of meaning through quotidian detail—the telemarketer's script, the wall treatment, the croquette—demonstrates a curator's understanding of how small objects accrue symbolic weight.
The film's entire architecture hinges on one recurring visual choice: the mother's presence as both comedic punctuation and gravitational center, and Sastre commits to it so completely that what could have been sitcom material becomes genuinely unsettling. That tonal pivot—from farce to something almost pitying—lives in the performance and framing alone, and that discipline is what separates this from a sketch.