Somos amigos
2014 · 13m · España
Directed by Carlos Solano
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, tense
Julio, a young section boss of an apparently solvent company, finds himself having to fire his best friend: Santi, along with another 24 workers under his orders, is going out onto the street, and his boss and also friend Max gives him advice on how to face the situation, but the snowball will get bigger and bigger.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise that could've been a earnest morality play instead becomes a darkly comic snowball of complicity—Julio gets trapped between loyalty and survival, and the film refuses to let him off the hook or offer easy villains, which is exactly the kind of subversive pressure cooker most scouts would shy away from.
Solano's tight 13 minutes operates within the workplace drama tradition while maintaining formal control over tone; the escalation from one firing to 25 carries the weight of classical structure, a chamber piece about institutional cruelty that knows exactly what it's doing with space and silence.
The specific choice here is how the camera stays locked on Julio's face during the advice scenes—there's barely any cut-away, just his eyes processing each instruction from Max, which makes the moral erosion feel like a physical collapse rather than a plot point.