Mr. Yellow Sweatshirt
2017 · 8m · United States
Directed by Pacho Velez, Yoni Brook
Genres: comedy, documentary
An anonymous commuter in a yellow sweatshirt repeatedly battles a MetroCard turnstile at a Jackson Heights subway station while onlookers watch.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A guy fights a turnstile for eight minutes and somehow it's the most subversive thing you'll see all week—the joke is that there is no punchline, just the pure absurdist friction of a body versus infrastructure, and everyone watching (including us) becomes complicit in the comedy of helplessness.
Velez and Brook operate in the lineage of Chloé Zhao's observational realism and early Safdie Brothers deadpan, using the Jackson Heights station as both stage and character, with the formal discipline to let the scene breathe without editorial flourish.
The decision to hold the camera static and let the crowd's expressions evolve from annoyance to bewildered fascination becomes the entire film—it's a masterclass in what you can extract from constraint and the specific texture of a real New York moment on no money.