Sensacional-ismo
2017 · 7m · España
Directed by Ignacio Grifol
Tones: darkly comic, provocative
María, a reporter on Ana Roja's programme, is sent to cover the postal voting in the elections live. However, she interviews Javier, who has also studied journalism but is unemployed, and live on air Javier gives a speech about labour integrity.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A live-TV ambush disguised as electoral coverage—this is what happens when you send a journalist to do stenography and accidentally hand the mic to class consciousness instead. Grifol doesn't resolve the tension, just lets it detonate, and that refusal to sand down the edges is exactly the kind of subversive comedy that makes consensus audiences deeply uncomfortable.
The film's formal constraint—the live broadcast format—echoes a lineage of media satire from Godard forward, though the execution feels more sitcom than interrogation; the tonal balance between workplace farce and labour polemic never quite settles into the considered rigor one might expect from a premise this charged.
The entire film hinges on Javier's uninterrupted monologue cutting through the manufactured cheerfulness of daytime TV, and Grifol's decision to keep the camera static and let the audio do the work—the clash of tones, the studio sound bleeding underneath—transforms what could've been a sketch into something genuinely destabilizing with almost no resources.