PRESIDENTE OBAMA
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Fran Grima (Francisco Javier de Velasco Grima)
Genres: biography, documentary, experimental
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
For over two decades, Madrid has been covered with posters proclaiming Mariano José Nsue Obama, born to be the next president of Equatorial Guinea; this experimental documentary follows his quixotic one-man presidential campaign, sustained by faith, memory and homage to his murdered father.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Twenty years of homemade posters declaring an unknown man president of a country most people can't locate—this is the kind of beautiful delusion that makes consensus filmmakers uncomfortable, and Grima leans into the absurdist faith of it without winking or pity-mongering.
Grima positions this portrait within the lineage of essay films that interrogate collective belief and memory, though the experimental documentary form risks sacrificing the formal clarity that would elevate this from curiosity into genuine archival meditation.
The decision to let the posters themselves—weathered, layered, accumulating—become the primary visual language transforms what could be a human-interest story into something about time, repetition, and how obsession leaves traces; that restraint is what makes three minutes feel complete.