Los niños vienen de Madrid
2021 · 15m · España
Directed by Jorge G. Satí, Julio Mora
Genres: comedy, experimental, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
What would happen if, in a very distant future, someone dared to relate, more badly than well, that part of history that we are now suffering, pandemic times, confinements and interpersonal distances? Would they get anything right?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Two Madrid-based directors weaponizing sci-fi not to imagine futures but to butcher the present — a pandemic retelling so badly intentional it becomes a kind of historiographic slapstick that makes you furious and laughing at the same time, which is exactly the perverse sweet spot most scouts would run from.
The film positions itself in a deliberate lineage of unreliable narration and defamiliarization, recalling both Brechtian distancing and the essayistic sci-fi shorts that interrogate memory through formal estrangement; the comedic distance between historical moment and its future recounting becomes the very substance of the form.
The single masterstroke here is the commitment to *bad* retelling as the entire mechanism — that refusal to let the future get the story 'right' is what transforms a pandemic reflection from well-meaning into genuinely unsettling, and it hinges entirely on the directors' willingness to trust the audience's discomfort with incompleteness.