Never Without My Denture (Jamás sin mi dentadura)
2017 · 5m · Francia
Directed by Alice Coutelle, Amin K.Goudarzi, Bruno Degunst, Cerise Grefferat, Eliette Gibaud, Guillaume Jarrosson, Hugo Favre, Nolwenn Grignon, Thi Bich Pham, Thibault Spieser, Thomas Dibet, Yanier Hechavarria
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Four retirees living in a nursing home are watching a soap opera when an evil nurse suddenly confiscates their television remote control.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A dozen directors weaponizing the remote control as existential drama in a nursing home — it's the kind of absurdist escalation that makes you laugh and then feel slightly unsettled, which means it's doing something right when everyone else would've played it safe.
The ensemble direction and tonal control here shows real awareness of slapstick's formal history, though the premise's simplicity risks diffusing across so many authorial voices rather than sharpening into something architecturally precise.
The specific choice to make the remote the actual battleground — not the nurse, not the residents' autonomy in the abstract, but that plastic object as pure power — is what elevates this from sketch to something with real pressure behind it.