Los Almendros–Plaza Nueva
2000 · 24m · España
Directed by Álvaro Alonso
Genres: comedy
Antonio drives a very special bus line where special things happen every day that occur on no other route in the city, in a humorous portrait of his relationship with his passengers.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A bus route comedy about daily rituals and passenger encounters sounds like the setup for a thousand forgettable shorts, but Alonso's refusal to deliver a conventional punchline — letting the 'special' things remain genuinely mundane — is genuinely subversive in its anti-climax.
Alonso works within a firmly established tradition of urban observational cinema, and the formal restraint here — the disciplined framing of a single route, the accumulation of small moments — recalls the structural precision of earlier European documentary-comedies.
The entire film hinges on the decision to play Antonio's deadpan acceptance of the unremarkable as the source of comedy, and that tonal calibration — finding humor in what *isn't* exaggerated — transforms a zero-budget premise into something genuinely alive.