Once campanadas
2025 · 6m · España
Directed by Óscar Parra de Carrizosa
Genres: fantasy, mystery, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
An ordinary New Year's Eve. Four friends. Midnight chimes that will not finish ringing. In 'Once campanadas', time becomes an enigma and reality folds in on itself: a night that refuses to end, inviting Lola, Pedro, Alejandro and Juanjo to check whether, perhaps, the end-of-year party ended before it began.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A New Year's Eve that swallows itself whole—time becomes a trap, the party collapses into recursion, and the premise does exactly what it promises: makes you sit with the absolute wrongness of it. This is the kind of surrealist sleight-of-hand that pisses off people who want plot, which means it's probably essential.
Carrizosa situates the film squarely in the Spanish literary-surrealist tradition—the temporal Möbius strip recalls Borges, the formal restraint and group-portrait structure echo the measured unease of mid-century European cinema. The campanadas themselves become a compositional motif, a ticking clock that refuses closure.
The decision to let the bells keep ringing—to commit fully to that single, escalating sound design choice rather than cut away—transforms what could've been a gimmick into genuine dread; it's the audio equivalent of refusing to blink, and it does everything the short needs to do on a skeleton crew budget.