Tempo
2016 · 1m · Países Bajos
Directed by Arjan Brentjes
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A man tries to relax on a park bench but keeps being bothered by the latest innovations; as his life slows down, technology advances ever faster.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The inversion is *chef's kiss*—instead of the tired "technology bad" sermon, Brentjes lets the man's voluntary slowness become the joke, the world accelerating around his stillness into pure absurdist chaos. It's the kind of premise that sounds like it shouldn't work but lands harder than a hundred earnest tech-critique shorts.
A tightly constructed satire that knows its lineage—the escalating visual gag sits in conversation with Tati's temporal comedy, though the compressed one-minute form strips it to pure formal wit, each interruption a precisely calibrated beat.
The edit is doing all the work here: those rhythmic cuts between the man's static frame and the frenetic tech-world fragments create the whole commentary without a word, a junior filmmaker's instinct for letting montage carry meaning.