HABIBI
2022 · 10m · España
Directed by Guillermo Cabot
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: provocative, tense
A city bus runs through the city. It stops and an Arab couple gets on; he addresses her in a loud, nervous voice. The passengers watch the increasingly heated argument with distrust and concern, until one of the passengers decides to intervene: 'You, habibi, sit down…'
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone's expecting a sermon about Islamophobia, but Cabot twists the knife the other way—the real provocation is that final intervention, which collapses all the moral scaffolding you built. It's the kind of subversive move that makes you uncomfortable about being uncomfortable, and that's exactly why it works.
The film operates within a lineage of social realist provocation—Haneke's gaze, perhaps—but the tonal pivot toward dark comedy feels unsettled, caught between genres rather than commanding them; the editing around that climactic intervention doesn't quite seal the argument it's trying to make.
The entire architecture hinges on that single word—'habibi'—recontextualizing everything we've watched from threat to solidarity in one utterance, and Cabot lets it sit unresolved, trusting the audience to hold the contradiction rather than resolving it for us.