Pico de Orizaba
2017 · 2m · España
Directed by Jaime Fidalgo
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, theatrical
At a boutique restaurant, a heated argument erupts among friends and exposes their sexual prejudices when one of them announces his liberation, inspired by a book, and another misunderstands it as a coming-out.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A two-minute argument that weaponizes misunderstanding to detonate every assumption about liberation, prejudice, and who gets to speak—the genius is that both characters are kind of right AND completely wrong, and the film refuses to let you pick a side or feel smug about it.
Fidalgo's theatrical staging recalls the drawing-room comedy tradition, but deploys it with surgical precision to expose how social performance masks actual belief; the restraint of the frame against the verbal escalation creates a formal tension that lingers.
The entire film pivots on a single misheard word—that moment when the listener's face reorganizes—and everything downstream, the tonal whiplash, the shame, the defensiveness, all crystallizes from that one beat of mistranslation; it's economical filmmaking that trusts the audience to feel the ground shift.