Montería
2023 · 3m · España
Directed by Víctor Díez Bildosola
Genres: drama, fantasy, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
During hunting season, a deer fleeing the hounds that roam the mountain is forced to metamorphose in order to survive, in an allegory of the transmasculine victim's experience.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A three-minute allegory that doesn't genuflect to the audience—the metamorphosis isn't explained or softened, just witnessed as pure survival logic, which is exactly the kind of refusal to sentimentalize that most festival programmers would nervously hedge. Díez Bildosola treats body horror and political metaphor as the same sentence, not two separate ideas, and that's disarming.
The film inherits from a precise lineage of bodily transformation cinema—Miéville, Cronenberg's conceptual DNA—yet grounds itself in a contemporary specificity that most surrealist work fumbles; the editing rhythm between flight and metamorphosis phases suggests formal deliberation rather than mere abstraction.
What elevates this beyond conceptual exercise is the decision to hold on the deer's face during the transformation itself—a single unbroken gaze that refuses to cut away or poeticize the moment, which makes the metamorphosis feel visceral and earned rather than merely symbolic.