Marioneta ciega
2013 · 19m · España , México
Directed by Jaime Fidalgo
Genres: drama, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
A depressed, manic puppeteer performs a ritual of penance with his puppets to absolve the tortured memory of a drunken night when the monster inside him was unleashed.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A puppeteer doing penance through his own creations—it's the kind of recursive, self-lacerating premise that sounds like pretentious navel-gazing until you realize Fidalgo's actually weaponizing it, turning the marionette into a mirror for psychological horror that most directors are too cowardly to attempt.
Fidalgo situates himself deliberately within a lineage of puppet-as-conscience storytelling (Jeunet, Švankmajer echoes), and the formal restraint—the decision to let ritual unfold rather than explain—demonstrates a curator's understanding of how surrealism functions through accumulation of image rather than narrative clarity.
The singular choice here is the sound design: the subtle shift from creaking wood and muffled string-work to the puppeteer's breathing, collapsing the boundary between puppet and operator until you can't hear one without hearing the other—that one acoustic decision is what makes the metaphor land instead of float.