Tiempo
2009 · 10m · España
Directed by Juan Carlos Mostaza
Genres: drama, experimental, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Using German expressionist narrative techniques with computer-generated locations and live action, the film tells a story about time, religious fanaticism, and terrorism. Those themes drive its pseudo-experimental narrative.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Mostaza's got the formal audacity to splice Weimar shadows into CGI space—it's bratty and conceptually unruly, but the terrorism-as-time-decay angle feels more thesis than viscera, more statement than provocation.
A rigorous formal argument: Mostaza consciously inherits German expressionism's visual grammar and rebuilds it in digital space to interrogate fanaticism's relationship to temporality—the kind of conceptual restraint and lineage-awareness that rewards close viewing and debate.
The decision to nest live action within expressionist CGI architecture is elegant in theory, but it's the editing rhythm—how Mostaza lets silences and cuts communicate dread rather than plot—that actually makes the 10 minutes land.