Maquetas
2009 · 4m · España
Directed by Carlos Vermut
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A mockumentary that enters a tragedy through first-person testimonies, laughing at and denouncing the traps of the tearjerker.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Vermut doesn't just deconstruct the tearjerker—he hijacks it and makes you complicit in the joke, which is the only honest response to how eagerly we consume other people's suffering. A 4-minute grenade lobbed at documentary sincerity and the whole apparatus of redemptive tragedy.
The mockumentary form here sits in productive tension with its source material, interrogating the grammar of first-person testimony in ways that echo Godard's media skepticism, though Vermut's tonal control—moving between comedy and denunciation without losing coherence—is genuinely difficult.
What locks this together is the decision to let the absurdity live in the testimonies themselves rather than in some knowing voiceover; letting the form betray itself from within means every cut between interviewees becomes a small act of sabotage.