Sin azúcar
2020 · 8m
Directed by Dany Ruz
Genres: dark comedy, drama, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Two friends reconnect on a video call after a long time apart, and something as ordinary as adding sugar to coffee turns into a surreal tragedy.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A video call between old friends should be inert, safe, forgettable—instead Ruz lets the mundane gesture of adding sugar detonate into cosmic horror, and the fact that nobody's talking about this yet is exactly why it matters.
The film's restraint in form—locked to a single Zoom rectangle—channels the tradition of constrained cinema from Hitchcock's rope to Buster Keaton's fixed frame, using formal limitation as the engine for escalating dread.
The decision to keep the camera locked on the caller's face while the visual world breaks apart around the other side of the screen does more with zero budget than most shorts do with equipment—that asymmetry is everything.