The chicken hunter
2024 · 4m · España
Directed by David Nieto, Pedro Muñoz
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A satire about the meat industry about the lightness of the human being in a dystopian world where a man who owns the only chicken in the city begins a journey through the streets of Valladolid that will lead him to his destiny — the same destiny as humanity.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A four-minute absurdist riff on meat-industry ethics that refuses to land where you expect—the premise (one chicken, entire city's salvation narrative) is too delirious for consensus taste, which is exactly why it works. Most scouts want their satire legible; Nieto and Muñoz seem allergic to it.
The formal restraint here is admirable—a dystopian premise that could bloat into sermon instead stays compressed, almost parable-like, though the execution doesn't quite achieve the tonal precision of the better absurdist lineage it's reaching toward.
The decision to shoot this in Valladolid's actual streets rather than stylize the dystopia gives the absurdism a disarming weight; that friction between mundane location and surreal premise is what makes the satire land instead of preach.