Rejected
2024 · 15m
Directed by Rene Rivas
Genres: comedy, experimental
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
An old videotape of a 1980s clip show resurfaces three commercials for the once-ubiquitous Sonu disc camera, each one rejected for a horrible reason of its own.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A found-footage comedy about rejected ads for a dead camera format shouldn't work, but Rivas turns the premise inside out—the rejections themselves become the joke, each one a small absurdist horror that gets funnier the less sense it makes. It's the kind of constraint-based subversion that makes you wonder why nobody's mined 1980s commercial archives for dark comedy before.
Rivas demonstrates precise control over tone and pacing by treating the found-tape conceit as a formal device rather than a gimmick, each rejection functioning as a discrete act in a considered structure that echoes both experimental cinema and the grammar of broadcast itself. The work sits consciously in the lineage of appropriation art and media archaeology, executed with the restraint of someone aware of what's been done before.
The decision to let the *rejections* carry the narrative weight—rather than the ads themselves or nostalgia for the format—is what transforms this from a one-liner into something that lands; Rivas trusts the audience to find the rhythm between the commercials and the reasons they failed, and that trust is what makes the absurdism actually stick.
Reviews
The three segments are all very good. The one with Bigfoot was especially hilarious, but the first segment was probably the best of the bunch.