Lima Splash
2009 · 15m · España
Directed by Antonio Savinelli
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
In times of crisis, the new Marketing director of the Lima Splash soft-drink brand considers changing agencies — but at the agency, they are not willing to allow it.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A corporate hostage drama disguised as a soft-drink commercial pitch—the absurdist premise that a marketing director can't actually *leave* is the kind of bureaucratic nightmare that makes most people avert their eyes, which is exactly why it works. Savinelli finds the darkly comic throat-grab in a system designed to trap you, and nobody else would've had the nerve to build a 15-minute short on that particular hostage situation.
The film's debt to Kafkaesque institutional satire is evident, though it doesn't quite achieve the formal precision of its lineage; the pacing occasionally opts for comedic convenience over the kind of tonal rigor that would elevate it into genuinely unsettling territory.
The crucial choice is the locked-door staging—keeping the entire negotiation confined to one boardroom, never cutting to freedom or escape, which transforms what could've been a glib corporate joke into something genuinely claustrophobic and trapped, all on what's clearly a minimal set budget.