Homónimos anónimos
2016 · 1m · España
Directed by José Luis Santos
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
They are not alcoholics or gamblers; they have not even done anything to provoke their situation. They did not choose their names, but now their lives are hell and they need help — so they have come to Homónimos Anónimos.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A one-minute absurdist ambush: people destroyed not by vice but by nominative determinism, seeking help from a support group that doesn't exist for a problem nobody else sees as real—it's a premise so perversely specific it loops back around to something true about how arbitrary suffering actually is.
Santos executes a cleanly structured parody of 12-step conventions, the formal rigor of the support group setup doing heavy lifting against the conceptual joke; it's a minor work but precisely calibrated, sitting comfortably in a lineage of institutional satire.
The genius move here is treating the absurd central conceit—shared names as genuine trauma—with the exact solemnity of an AA meeting, and that tonal commitment, sustained across sixty seconds without winking, is what makes the whole thing land.