Nora hoa Bixente?
2000 · 14m · España
Directed by Aitor Arregi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A young man who has missed the last bus starts hitchhiking and is picked up by a man; the scene repeats in the following days until the lift becomes a habit and the polite driver gradually grows tired of him.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise so deceptively simple it could bore you to tears, except Arregi weaponizes repetition into something genuinely unsettling—the kindness curdling into resentment, the ritual becoming a trap neither character knows how to exit. It's the kind of absurdist cruelty that makes you uncomfortable precisely because it refuses to judge either of them.
Arregi's structural restraint here—the disciplined return to the same pickup point, the incremental shifts in tone and body language across iterations—suggests a filmmaker aware of how Bresson and Haneke have used repetition as formal inquiry, though Nora hoa Bixente? locates its own register in something lighter, almost comic.
The entire film pivots on a single choice: the driver's barely perceptible fatigue, accumulating across those repeated lifts in real time, until what began as generosity feels like a slow drowning—it's the micro-performance choice that transforms a one-joke premise into something unexpectedly aching and true.