Teseo
2024 · 3m · España
Directed by Vastyan Ponce
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
An elderly watchmaker who has spent more than forty years repairing the same clock begins to wonder whether the clock that entered his workshop decades ago is still the same one.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's *technically* about a watchmaker, which sounds like the most precious indie premise imaginable—but Ponce actually uses the Ship of Theseus as a genuine lever for existential dread, not as window dressing, and that refusal to sentimentalize the setup is exactly the kind of restraint most filmmakers can't manage.
Vastyan Ponce locates *Teseo* in a deliberate lineage of philosophical microdramas—the patient, formally composed meditation on identity and time—and executes it with the kind of considered pacing and tonal precision that recalls the European short tradition without genuflecting to it; the 3-minute runtime becomes a formal argument in itself.
The decision to keep the camera fixed on the clockmaker's hands and face rather than the mechanism itself—letting us feel the temporal anxiety through stillness and micro-expressions instead of cutting between close-ups of gears—is what transforms a conceptual puzzle into something genuinely unsettling.