Pequeño gran circo
2025 · 18m · México
Directed by Adán Erubiel Liddiard Cárdenas
Genres: comedy, drama, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
An anthology of three stories spanning half a decade of the current, postmodern 20s, with a circus of peculiar and bizarre characters who seem taken from one's closest circle of friends.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that treats the postmodern 20s like the genuinely weird circus it is, refusing to wink at the audience or resolve its own absurdity into meaning. Liddiard Cárdenas gets that the strangest thing about your friends right now isn't that they're eccentric; it's that they've stopped pretending to be anything else.
The trilogy structure echoes a lineage of episodic surrealism (Jeunet, maybe early Kaufman), but the execution flattens what could be studied formal play into something closer to scrolling—ambitious architecture undermined by a resistance to the very craft rigor that would make the conceit land.
There's something crucial in how Liddiard Cárdenas holds on faces just long enough for the bizarre to read as genuine—the decision to let the circus characters breathe instead of performing their own strangeness is what keeps this from collapsing into mere aesthetic decoration.