No Rueda
2017 · 7m · Italia
Directed by Angelo Bianchi
Tones: darkly comic, whimsical
A gentleman trades glances with a beautiful young woman and tries every move to flirt during a walk, while a bar waiter also watches the young woman. Observation reveals that attraction points elsewhere, and a next-day meeting leads to a dinner invitation with a final surprise.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A rom-com that looks like it's going one way and gleefully yanks the rug out—the setup is so aggressively conventional that when it pivots, you actually feel the trap snap shut. Most scouts would polish this into a Sundance darling; Felix picks it *because* it's genuinely perverse about desire and expectation.
Bianchi's command of the observational frame—layering three gazes across a deceptively simple urban geometry—recalls the precision of early Kiarostami or Panahi, where formal restraint becomes the entire point of view.
The sound design isolating the moment of realization, or a single cut that recontextualizes everything the audience thought they were watching—that's where this lives, and it's the kind of micro-choice that separates a clever premise from an actually *felt* reversal.