Proverbio chino

The scouts

A Cuban guy wants to work at a Chinese restaurant and everyone loses their minds—the premise is so defiantly stupid it loops back around to genius, and San Román has the guts to play it completely straight while the world implodes around it. This is the kind of absurdist setup that makes you furious other people aren't making it.

The film's restraint is its formal strength: by refusing to wink at the audience or oversell the satire, San Román positions the absurdity within a lineage of deadpan political comedy that prizes observation over punchline. It's a elegant inversion of the immigrant narrative, executed with the kind of compositional clarity that separates student work from considered filmmaking.

The singular choice here is the casting—Sergio's complete, unshakeable earnestness in the face of collective hysteria is what makes the satire bite; a wink or a smirk would collapse the whole thing, but this performance holds the impossible premise together with pure conviction.