Ponys
2005 · 10m · España
Directed by David Planell
After lunch, while the men talk about their things in another room, Marta, Natalia and Ester take their ponys for a walk — but what is a pony, what is it for, and who ends up winning the game?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2005 Spanish short that plays the long game on absurdity—three women and their 'ponys' exposing the theater of gender politics through pure deadpan commitment to an escalating non-joke. It's the kind of film that makes you uncomfortable before you realize you're laughing at the structure itself, which is exactly when Felix knows he's found something.
Planell's precise control of tone and spatial composition—the careful staging of those women against the domestic interior, the disciplined restraint of the performances—situates this within a lineage of European absurdist comedy that values the unsaid as much as the action.
The film's entire architecture hinges on the decision to never explain what the ponys actually are or do, trusting the viewer to sit in that ambiguity while the performers hold the frame with absolute seriousness; that commitment to leaving the joke deliberately incomplete is what transforms a simple premise into something genuinely strange.