La Cara B
2012 · 20m · España
Directed by Elena Cid
Genres: dark comedy, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Pablo is addicted to electric current. Every time he shoots up he sees his other life, his other possibilities, the choices he let pass. There is only one problem: Pablo is also addicted to electric current.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A drug addiction film that isn't about drugs at all — it's about the dopamine hit of glimpsing unlived lives, which is somehow more fucked up and honest than any overdose narrative. Cid knows the premise is its own punchline and leans into the absurdity without winking, which is exactly why lesser filmmakers would've neutered it.
The film's formal restraint—its willingness to let surrealism breathe without baroque flourish—places it in conversation with experimental narrative cinema that trusts the audience's discomfort; the editing rhythm compounds the dissociative experience rather than clarifying it, a deliberate choice that echoes the structural concerns of 70s essay films.
The decision to loop the premise—making 'addiction to electric current' mean both literal and metaphorical—hinges entirely on the sound design and how each hallucination sequence fractures the visual grammar, and Cid commits to that one choice so completely that it transforms a high-concept gimmick into something genuinely disorienting and alive.