Shituation
2016 · 8m · España
Directed by Olga Alamán
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, humorous
The day public television was to premiere the new season of the series Olga worked on, RTVV faded to black. Convinced she would otherwise end up waitressing in Spain, like so many young people she emigrates to do it in London instead: this is the story of her 'shituation'.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is a beautiful middle finger to the film industry's own mythology—a TV worker's entire future collapses not through personal failure but bureaucratic collapse, and instead of wallowing, Olga just... leaves. It's anti-redemption arc disguised as a coming-of-age story, which is exactly the kind of subversion nobody asks for.
Alamán locates herself within a lineage of personal essay cinema and migration narratives, but the formal restraint here—letting the mundane absurdity of waitressing in London speak for itself rather than performing victimhood—suggests a filmmaker aware of how easily this story could become self-pitying melodrama.
The masterstroke is the tonal whip: Alamán treats her own professional devastation with the same deadpan observational humor she applies to shift work and homesickness, and that refusal to separate the two—to let crisis and comedy exist in the same frame without flinching—is what makes eight minutes feel like a complete emotional statement on precarity.