La cerca
2004 · 21m · Colombia
Directed by Rubén Mendoza
Genres: drama, surrealism
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
Francisco Maldonado lives tormented by his dreams, in which, wielding multiple weapons, he attacks his father, with whom he has lost intense contact since his mother's death.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Dreams-as-violence is the oldest shortcut in the surrealist playbook, and Mendoza doesn't subvert it so much as inhabit it competently—which means it lands exactly where you'd expect, and that's precisely why most people will sleep through it.
Mendoza situates this in a clear lineage: the psychological dream-logic of early Buñuel, the father-wound as Oedipal inevitability—and executes that inheritance with formal precision, the surrealism felt as visual grammar rather than affectation, every cut earning its melancholy.
The decision to keep the father largely unseen, letting absence do the emotional work instead of confrontation, is what separates this from a dozen other grief-and-rage shorts—it's the structural choice that makes the whole thing breathe.