Tiempo de descuento
1997 · 8m · Argentina
Directed by Flavio Nardini
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, sports
Tones: darkly comic, tense
A kidnapping unfolds alongside a vital football match for Racing. The two storylines collide in a dark comedy where time is running out on both fronts.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1997 Argentine short that treats a kidnapping and a football match as narrative equals—not parallel, but *simultaneous*—is exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable because it actually works. Most filmmakers would pick a lane; Nardini treats both urgencies as equally absurd and equally real, which is the whole joke.
Nardini's structural gambit sits in a lineage of European absurdist comedy that privileges formal constraint over easy sentiment, though the Football-as-Metaphor tradition here risks feeling more gimmick than philosophy; the editing will determine whether this is integration or collision.
The entire film pivots on a single choice: letting neither storyline absorb the other, which means every cut and sound bridge has to justify why we're not watching the 'more important' crisis—and on a micro-budget in '97, that's a decision that either disappears or becomes everything.