KOBE
2013 · 10m · España
Directed by Juan Calvo
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark
A young executive celebrates a possible promotion while getting rid of her closest problems, in a story adapted from a tale by Elisabeth Jakob.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Adapting Elisabeth Jakob feels like the safe choice until you realize Calvo's actually inverting the morality play—making complicity look like ambition, turning self-improvement into self-erasure. It's folk-tale subversion dressed in corporate drag, which shouldn't work but does.
The formal precision here is the point: Calvo understands that dark comedy about professional ascent requires impeccable tonal control, and the adaptation from Jakob's source material demonstrates a filmmaker thinking seriously about narrative tradition and moral architecture. This is a short that knows exactly what it's doing.
The decision to play the protagonist's rationalization completely straight—no winking at the audience—forces us into her complicity rather than letting us judge from above, and that one tonal commitment transforms what could've been a shallow satire into something genuinely unsettling.