Las sobrinas de Valerie
2016 · 15m · España
Directed by Carlos Aceituno
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, provocative
Beatriz is a secretary who meets her boss for lunch; he suggests his intentions go beyond the strictly professional. What begins as a romantic evening will end in a nightmare for him when he encounters two fanatics who want to put Valerie Solanas's SCUM manifesto into practice, to the limit.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A secretary-turned-vigilante revenge thriller built on radical feminist theory—most scouts would've binned this premise as 'problematic,' which is exactly why it's fascinating. Aceituno swings for something genuinely unsettling, where the joke and the violence occupy the same frame, and nothing lands where you expect it to.
The film's formal gambit—pivoting from romantic comedy tropes into ideological extremism—shows a deliberate hand, though the tonal register strains under the weight of its own provocations. It's the kind of short that courts disagreement by design, which reads more as provocation than considered narrative architecture.
What makes this work is the precise moment the power dynamic inverts: Aceituno doesn't telegraph it, doesn't soften it with a reaction shot—he just lets the nieces arrive and the frame reorganize itself, and suddenly a date-rape setup becomes something else entirely. That economy of information is what elevates a scrappy 15-minute premise into something genuinely disorienting.