Paella
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Guillermo García, Darío Monrabal
A man sets out to cook the perfect paella that will please everyone — and spare him his nephew's negative comments.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A three-minute short about a guy trying to cook paella to avoid family criticism should be aggressively boring, but García and Monrabal have found something genuinely weird in the obsession—it's the kind of premise that works *because* it's stupid, which is exactly the kind of stupid most filmmakers are too scared to commit to.
The restraint here is admirable: a domestic comedy that knows its debt to the tradition of small-scale family farce, executed with the kind of formal precision—timing, framing, the economy of each beat—that separates craft from mere premise.
In three minutes, they've hung the entire emotional weight on a single sound design choice—the sizzle of the paella, growing louder and more chaotic as the pressure mounts—which transforms what could've been a sketch into something genuinely tense and human.