The Robbery
2024 · 3m · Spain
Directed by Andrew De Zen
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
Three Russians in Moscow execute what looks like a bank heist — but the film reveals they are anti-war protesters staging a demonstration, facing the same seven-year prison sentence they'd receive for actual robbery, made in collaboration with Amnesty International.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 3-minute film that uses heist grammar to make a point about Russian protest law — the genre machinery is completely expendable once you understand what it's actually about, which is the point.
Andrew De Zen shot on 35mm for Amnesty International — using the heist genre's structural logic to make a purely political argument about Russian anti-war protesters. The retroactive reframe is the film's sharpest move.
Three minutes on 35mm where the heist-genre reframes as Amnesty International anti-war protest — the structural reveal retroactively rewrites every preceding frame. That's a clean, ruthless use of the short form.
Reviews
This is a very real situation affecting a lot of people, some of who are close friends of mine so every choice came back to – is this simple, is this sincere?
Festivals
- Ciclope International Festival of Craft 2024, Gold
- Hollyshorts International Film Festival 2024