No Vacancy
2025 · 7m · Colombia/USA
Directed by Miguel Rodrick
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: melancholic, surreal
A motel night clerk drifts through chaotic nights of mysterious phone calls, disruptive guests, and battles with addiction, his unraveling mind searching for release from a past that lingers in every room. A psychedelic animated exploration of guilt, remorse, and inner heaviness.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Solo motel-clerk descent with intentional AI 'digital hallucination' artifacts as the protagonist's fractured mind — the AI-glitch framing as diegetic could be brilliant or could be a fig leaf. Skeptical curiosity.
I find the deliberate use of AI 'glitches' as authored hallucinations a more honest negotiation with the technology than most contemporary attempts — a single artist composing every element evokes the auteurist totality of David OReilly. Whether the conceit reads as integration or as alibi is the open question.
Director did everything — wrote, animated, composed, performed music — and intentionally used AI-generated glitch artifacts as in-narrative 'digital hallucinations' for a fractured mind. That's AI deployed as material with conceptual rigor, not as a shortcut.
Reviews
No Vacancy captures that state with startling honesty... it immerses you in the raw, unfiltered way a mind moves when it's left to its own devices.
The film combines trippy vibes and vivid colors with a real potent sense of melancholy.
Festivals
- Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival 2025, Best U.S. Latino Animated Short Film
- Athens International Film + Video Festival 2025
- Seattle Latino Film Festival 2025
- Anifilm 2025