The Turk Shop
2017 · 7m · Sweden
Directed by Bahar Pars
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
In a Stockholm creative office, new hire Asal questions a colleague's use of a racial slur during an anecdote — and it is Asal who ends up accused of creating a bad working environment.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The genius move here is flipping the power dynamic so hard that the person calling out racism becomes the villain in the room — it's the kind of premise that makes everyone uncomfortable in exactly the right way, and most scouts would reject it for being 'too mean,' which is precisely why it works.
Pars executes a rigorously structured satire in the lineage of Haneke's social critique, where the editing rhythm and tone shifts perform the ideological collapse of the office itself; it's formally precise in how it weaponizes workplace comedy conventions against themselves.
The single choice that makes this land is the moment Asal realizes she's lost the room—a micro-shift in performance that happens in silence, where the budget constraints actually sharpen the emotional precision and force us into her isolation without any narrative scaffolding.